tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21614957539715057312024-02-20T19:50:27.426+10:00Conservatism as HeresyPosts by <a href="http://jonjayray.tripod.com/">John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)</a>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.comBlogger62125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-63758136482486090702008-02-25T14:18:00.006+10:002008-02-27T23:39:30.311+10:00<br><br> <p align="center">
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<b><i>Congratulations! You have reached the site of a "reverse-blook"! A blook is a blog that has been turned into a book but this is a book that has been turned into a blog. The most famous "reverse-blook" is the serialization of <a href="http://www.pepysdiary.com/">Pepys Diary</a>. You access the chapters of this blook by clicking on the chapter headings in the table of contents below.
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My home page is <a href="http://jonjayray.tripod.com">here</a>. My main blog is <a href="http://dissectleft.blogspot.com">here</a> and you can email me <a href="mailto:jonjayray@hotmail.com">here</a>
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Originally published in 1974 by the A.N.Z. Book Co. of Sydney, Australia
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<font size="5"> <b>Table of Contents</b></font>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2008/01/note-from-j_27.html">Acknowledgements </a>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2008/01/note-from-j.html">The Authors </a>
<br><br>
<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/12/from-j.html"> Foreword </a>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/11/introduction-from-j.html"> What is Conservatism? -- A personal Preface</a>
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<i><b>PART ONE</b></i><br>
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<b>THE ENVIRONMENT</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/10/chapter-1-from-j.html"> <I>1. Are People Pollution?</i> <br></a>
Resources not fixed; people create resources; people are resources; `Populate or perish'; migrant ghettoes; problems of the cities; food; economies of scale; Asia and the West must be treated differently; pollution control by legislation.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/09/chapter-2-from-j.html"> <i>2. Will Population Growth Lead to Famine or Plenty?</i></a><br>
(By COLIN CLARK) <br>
Past pessimism; Dr Ehrlich; Monday Conference; animal versus vegetable protein; speculation versus facts; falls in fertility; population growth goes with better per capita standards of living; Japan.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/08/chapter-3-from-j.html"> <i>3. Is There a Minerals and Energy Crisis?</i></a><br>
When will we run out? Fossil fuels versus nuclear and solar energy; fusion; hydrogen; radioactive wastes; aluminium from clay; interchangeability of mineral products.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/07/chapter-4-from-j.html"> <i>4. The Doomsters Rise Again</i></a><br>
(By PETER SAMUEL) <br>
Resources diplomacy; impossibility of prediction; Club of Rome; energy costs are declining; coal reserves; best prices for minerals are now; conservationism produces shortages; ignoring of economic factors; ineffectiveness of resources diplomacy.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/06/chapter-5-from-j.html"><i>5. In Defence of French Nuclear Tests</i></a> <br>
Reliability of the USA; credibility of a French deterrent; sharing nuclear secrets; ideology or scientific caution?
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/05/chapter-6-from-j.html"><i>6. Decentralisation: Or the Myth that it is Good to Get People to Settle Where They Don't Want to</i><br> </a>
Having your cake and eating it too; historically a military and farmer's lobby; more direct defence expenditure better; urban blight; great urban size range already available for the choosing; city attractions strong; variety goes with bigness; people are rewarding; transport costs are a huge proportion of total costs; country industries are expensive; people have to be bribed to live in the country; big cities enable specialised jobs.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/04/chapter-7-from-j.html"><i>7. Can We Afford Decentralisation?</i></a><br>
(By PETER SAMUEL) <br>
Secret government report on costs; no diseconomies for Melbourne versus smaller centres; service costs higher in smaller centres; police, hospitals, education, water supply, sewerage cheaper in Melbourne; housing cheaper; high growth rate advantageous.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/03/chapter-8-from-j.html"> <i>8. Pollution: The Cost of Clean Living</i></a><br>
(By PETER SAMUEL) <br>
Cranks in danger of discrediting conservationism; economic growth tends to lower pollution and resource consumption; unreasoning pessimism; environmentalism an elitist luxury; inegalitarianism may be good; many development projects are uneconomic as well as exploitive of the environment; water conservation destructive and uneconomic; clearing of farmland often stupid; tax pollution; subsidise trees; tax unsafe cars; tax roadspace.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-9-from-j.html"> <i>9. Concorde and the Destruction of Ozone</i><br></a>
(By S. T. BUTLER) <br>
Ozone produced by sunlight from ordinary oxygen; Ozone also continually being broken down; ozone absorbs dangerous radiation; Scientific committees see no danger; oxides of nitrogen break down ozone; nuclear explosions create vast amounts of nitrogen oxides; ozone has in fact increased.
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<b>RACE AND RACISM</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2007/01/chapter-10-from-j.html"> <I>10. Rhodesia: In Defence of Mr Smith</i><br></a>
Belgian Congo; self-government since 1920s; Amin; education for voting; Rhodesians trusting; high level of black education; Rhodesia at war; the swing to South African methods; whites need help, not attack.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/12/chapter-11-from-j.html"><I>11. The Rhodesia Information Centre</i><br></a>
Freedom of information at stake; propaganda; must have both sides; Communist bookshops never closed down; conservatives the guardians of liberty; open government; freedom to agree only under Leftism.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/11/chapter-12-from-j.html"> <I>12. Racism in Australia?</i><br> </a>
Defining racism; does racial confrontation imply prejudice?; inverse racism; cultural differences; contact and emergence of `prejudice'; backlash; apartheid emerges naturally.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/10/journal-of-human-relations-1972-20-71.html"> <i>13 Are All Races Equally Intelligent? -- 0r: When is Knowledge Knowledge?</i></a>
<br>Sociology of knowledge; Intelligence A and B; substitution of ideology for science; when is moral moral?; ecological influences on evolution.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/09/chapter-11-in-f.html"><I>14. In Defence of the White Australia Policy</i></a>
<br>White Australia generally disclaimed; academic moralism perverted; six arguments against the policy; Australia is already culturally very diverse; Australia has one of the world's most liberal immigration policies; Right and wrong are abitrary; a pragmatic account of moralism removes its imperative force; how moral delusions are acquired; draining talent from Asia; Asian immigration would create racism; national characteristics; avoidance of conflicts.
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<b>ECONOMICS AND THE ECONOMY</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/08/chapter-15-from-j.html"> <I>15. Economic Growth--Blessing or Curse?</i></a>
<br>(By J. W. NEVILE)
<br>Former advocacy of growth; many urgent needs still to be met; anti-materialism; Mishan; are underdeveloped countries to stay that way?; anti-car movement; growth and the status quo; non-renewable resources; growth reduces the birthrate; doomsday may never come; poverty in the underdeveloped world is the real problem; maximum growth; GNP; type of growth; present problems.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/07/chapter-16-from-j.html"><I>16. Is Inflation Inevitable?</i></a>
<br>Why worry?; progressive taxation; workers must lose; price control; wage rises in excess of productivity rises are illusory; socialism; the `worldwide' excuse; weak governments issue too much money; who is to blame; inflation is irreversible; who suffers; the worker's savings; capital accumulation; nationalisation; needy people; subjective welfare; collective versus private goods; strikes; cost push; velocity of circulation; rural receipts; imported inflation; falling standards of living; investment spending; consumer spending; monopolies; trade unions as monopolies; no change in the share of capital and labour for over 100 years; wealth is goods and services; small potential effect of `sharing the wealth'; competitive scramble; cost of living adjustments; productivity indexation; non-monetary relativities index; the nature of power; revolutionaries; a generational hypothesis on industrial unrest; business monopolies; competition as price control; government protection of monopolies; restrictive trade practices; bureaucratic price control.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/05/chapter-17-from-j.html"><i>17. How to Control Union Power</i></a>
<br>Taft-Hartley amendment; the problem of enforcement; court settlement of disputes; rule of the jungle; outlawry; a frightening penalty; unlikely to be used; strikers cannot have it both ways.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/05/chapter-18-from-j.html"> <I>18. Why Price Control Won't Work</i></a>
<br>(By PETER SAMUEL)
<br>South Australian petrol versus petrol elsewhere; rationing under Chifley; business profits relatively small; must be accompanied by wage control; controls much more bureaucratic than a freeze; controls can be avoided; consumers penalised; some price controls impossible; helps managers victimize shareholders; educative role of prices tribunal most important.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/04/chapter-19-from-j.html"><I>19. Economic Nationalism and Foreign Investment</i></a>
<br>Foreign investment a gift; Singapore; savings necessary to affluence; benefits for both parties; the alternatives are less growth or more totalitarianism; tariff cuts; marketing agreements.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/03/chapter-20-from-j.html"><I>20. Why Some Prices Should Rise</i></a>
<br>(By MILTON FRIEDMAN)
<br>Oil crisis; government mismanagement; evil effect of price controls; higher prices would mean economization and increased supply; quantifying `need'; the poor; the market will do what the government cannot.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/02/chapter-21-from-j.html"><I>21. Protecting Australian Industry</i></a>
<br>Industry bigger spongers than the farmers; some industries have eighty per cent tariff protection; much Australian capital tied up in unproductive enterprise; unions and businesses both show contempt for consumer; businessmen two-faced; only the inefficient need protection; cheap Asian labour; loss of Australian jobs; tariffs like narcotics; some industries should go broke; defence self-sufficiency; infant industries; motor vehicle industry senile; under free-trade Australia's secondary exports could increase.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2006/01/chapter-22-from-j.html"> <I>22. Cutting up the National Cake</i></a>
<br>(By PETER SAMUEL)
<br>Anti-materialism contradicted by behaviour; class politics; the worker share; Mr Tilling; long-term shares are stable.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/12/chapter-23-from-j.html"><I>23. The Traps of the 'Needs' Concept</i></a>
<br>(By PETER SAMUEL)
<br>Pseudo-technocracy; needs conditional; resource ceilings; penalises independence; against power diffusion; pricing needed.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/11/chapter-24-from-j.html"><I>24. The National Health and the Case for Prepaid Medical Care</i></a>
<br>No freedom for doctors; Mr Cameron; shortage of doctors the problem; use of existing funds; economies of scale; bigness leads to inefficiency; the Kaiser plan; Government can fix fees already; 'non-participating' doctors; faster consultations; artificial scarcity of doctors; more training facilities a better investment; doctors should be poor.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/10/chapter-25-from-j.html"><I>25. Dr Jim's Moral Indignation Meter</i></a>
<br>(By ALAN FITZGERALD)
<br>Boycott of Portuguese trade mission; no trade with China because of Tibet; no trade with Russia because of Czechoslovakia; no trade with Africa because of military dictatorships.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/09/chapter-26-from-j.html"><I>26. Plastic Radicals in Academe</i></a>
<br>(By JOHN SARUM)
<br>Community of scholars; staff remote; no longer a playground for the rich; working class students looked down on; like Marx but not beer and football; contempt for the worker's pleasures; slumming soon gives way to a Nice Home; drug market capitalistic; contempt for intellectual standards.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/08/chapter-27-from-j.html"><I>27. The Vietnam Protest</i></a>
<br>(By ALAN REID)
<br>Moratorium ban on Bryant; peace or Communist victory?; Cambodia and the Americans; objectivity penalized.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/07/chapter-28-from-j.html"><I>28. Sport and the Anti-Apartheid Movement</i></a>
<br>(By BOB ELLIS)
<br>South African cricketers like Cassius Clay, Daniel and Sinyaevsky; freedom of expression; banning Solzhenitsyn because Russia is anti-semitic; ban M.A.S.H. because America bombs Vietnam; protest supports Rightist parties; aggression and moralism of the Left; nobody helped by the protest.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/06/chapter-29-from-j.html"> <I>29. Free Speech Versus Leftist Censorship</i></a>
<br>Leftist physical attacks on Jensen and Eysenck; dangerous to have God on your side; violence of `peace' demonstrators; unionist postal censorship; cut off phones at Rhodesia Information Centre; Leftist followers of Goebbels.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/05/chapter-30-from-j.html"> <i>30 Murphyism</i> </a>
<br>McCarthyism; Croatian `terrorism'; Yugoslav leader Bijedic; visit a pretence; no evidence against Croatians; deporting refugees from totalitarianism; para-military training and Boy Scouts.
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<b>ASSOCIATED TOPICS</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/04/chapter-31-from-j.html"> <i>31. Are We Over-educated?</i></a>
<br>Education a sacred cow; sixty per cent of state budgets spent already; education to fit you better to society; Cato and liberal education; too much stress on the 'humanities'; 'personal development'; transfer of training; education for citizenship; 'broadening the mind'; training for leisure; literature courses deter readers; Socially adaptive attitudes and social skills; `humanities' a recreation only; taxpayer should not be asked to subsidise something unless benefit to him shown; supply leading demand.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/03/chapter-32-from-j.html"> <I>32. Upper Houses</i></a>
<br>(By PETER COLEMAN)
<br>Politicians as dogsbodies; NSW upper house; 1917 Bryce report; revisions and amendments are valuable; fosters expertise in government.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/02/chapter-33-from-j.html"><I>33. Subsidies to 'The Arts'</i></a>
<br>Even mediocre talent is now rewarded without subsidy; risk; are art lovers morally better?; the arts as recreation; good art is what pleases people.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/01/chapter-34-from-j.html"><I>34. The 'Power Elite'</i></a>
<br>'Them'; conspiracy theories on Right and Left; Hitler a socialist; paranoia and socialism; conspiracy theories totalitarian; fractionation of power; the weakness of Whitlam and Hawke; big business; Lang Hancock; the military industrial complex; Vietnam; power is plausibility; persuasion; the ecology movement.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/12/chapter-35-from-j.html"><I>35. Women and Suburbia</i></a>
<br>(By JUDY JOHNSON)
<br>Boredom or relaxation?; prices; job satisfaction versus hobbies; working wives overstressed; absent mothers.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/11/chapter-36-from-j.html"><I>36. Blueprint for Disaster: American Defence Expenditure</i></a>
<br>(By STEWART ALSOP)
<br>Army of only 800,000; only fifteen per cent fighting men; Soviet seapower; new Soviet missiles; MIRVing; N. Vietnamese treaty-breaking; Democrat budget cuts; betrayal of S. Vietnam.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/10/chapter-37-from-j.html"> <I>37. In Defence of Monarchy</i></a>
<br>(By T. D. ALLMAN)
<br>Effect of abolishing monarchies not good; Farouk; colonels the alternative; the Shah of Iran; non-political identity; ceremonial; dignity; Thailand; Queen of England; American Presidents.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/09/chapter-38-from-j.html"><i>38 Conformity or Diversity? -- Which Way are We Going?</i></a>
<br>(By ALVIN TOFFLER)
<br>Ellul, Toynbee and the myth of vanishing choice; Design-a-Mustang; superindustrialism flourishes on variety; standardisation a crude initial phase only; cigarettes, petrol, groceries, furniture; costs of variation declining; automation enables variety; automobiles.
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<i><b>PART TWO</i></b>
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<b>PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/08/chapter-39-from-j.html"><I>39. Do Mental Events Exist or is Man Just a Protein Machine?</i></a>
<br>Psychophysiology; reflexology; cerebroscope; responses as stimuli; blueness is in the object; imageless thought; orienting responses; consciousness; perceptual inferences; touch; behaviourism; mind as feeling.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/07/chapter-40-from-j.html"><I>40. Is Self Theory the Hypostatisation of a Syncategorematic Word?</i></a>
<br>Existentialism and phenomenology; Sartre, Rogers, Bertocci and Calkins; varying definitions of `self; need for interpretation; tautologies and statements untrue by definition; experiences having themselves; `self' as a grammatical marker; reflexivity; stipulative definition.
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<b>AUTHORITARIANISM</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/06/chapter-41-from-j.html"><I>41. Are Authoritarians Sick?</i></a>
<br>(By BRIAN CRABBE)
<br>Nazi-type behaviour; methodological doubts about California work; mythology; acquiescence; dogmatism; masking variables; conservatism and psychopathology; scales; subjects students; neuroticism and norms; subcultural groups among students; religion; sensation seeking; few significant relationships; authoritarianism and Methodism; situational factors.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/05/chapter-42-from-j.html"><I>42. Authoritarian Humanism</i></a>
<br>Authoritarianism of the Left; Rokeach; Eysenck; toughmindedness; National Servicemen; volunteer artifact; balanced 'F' scale; item analysis; negative items turn out positive; Kerlinger's `criterial referents'; reliabilities; acquiescence; yeasaying score; simplistic wording and intolerance of ambiguity.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/04/chapter-43-from-j.html"><I>43. Are the Workers Authoritarian, Conservative or Both?</i></a>
<br>Lipset; Miller & Riessman; weakened thesis; Lipsitz; Hamilton; economic and non-economic conservatism; opinion polls; validity; scales; 'F' scale; acquiescence and balance; assuming what you have to prove; perceived economic deprivation; ethnocentrism; vertical and horizontal social stratification; door-to-door survey; low and high status suburbs; 'BF scale, 'BD' scale and 'AA' scale; upper class dichotomy; workers conservative but not authoritarian; 'permissiveness'.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/03/journal-of-conflict-resolution-1972-16.html"><i>44 Are Militarists Sick?</i> </a>
<br>Eckhardt & Newcombe; `F' and `T' scale defects; sampling; student attitudes; Eysenck `N' scale; Ethnocentrism scale; Wilson & Patterson `C' scale; acquiescence; student behaviour; peer and teacher ratings; `AA' scale; submissiveness; Masling, Greer & Gilmore; conscript sample; militarism scale; social adaptability; conservatism items; cluster analysis; intercorrelations unexpected in direction; Elms; behaviour not same as attitudes; Titus; LaPiere; militarists racially tolerant; Social desirability response set; social cohesiveness of Army men; Intolerance of ambiguity and order; rigidity; sociology of knowledge and authoritarianism; militarist better adjusted.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/02/australian-journal-of-psychology-1972.html"><I>45. Anti-Authoritarianism: An Indicator of Pathology</i></a>
<br>(By J. MARTIN & J. J. RAY)
<br>Rudin and rational authoritarianism; Fromm; liberalism; Perth; Tauss index; Goossen test of intelligence; yeasaying; two halves of Rudin scale differ; Welsh R scale; partialiing out social desirability; pro-authoritarianism not neurotic; anti-authoritarianism pathological; rationality; previous research accepted for wrong reasons.
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<b>RACISM</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2004/01/chapter-46-from-j.html"> <I>46. Are Racists Ethnocentric?</i></a>
<br>Ethnocentrism as an explanation for racism; two value logic; psychological and logical opposites; misanthropy; group-specific attitudes; hygiene; postjudice; rational prejudice; Adorno et al.; generality of prejudice; religious prejudice; some prejudice is irrational; prejudice and contact; Redfern; Southern Europeans; door-to-door sampling; four scales; Redfern and Zetland show similar tolerance; different forms of dislike little related; assumption falsified; Jews and S. Europeans seen as similar; location of Aborigines in Redfern; categorising people; nouns as generalisations; all the evidence never in.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2003/12/chapter-47-from-j.html"><I>47. Prejudice Both Pathological and Natural</i></a>
<br>(By MAX BELOFF)
<br>'Racism' as a term of abuse; international politics; Nazism; race is a political factor; psychological diffences not allowed to be mentioned; equality a dogma; Africanisation is racism; Jewish racism; Arab-Israeli relations; anti-Japanese racism; past non-racialism; move to homogenisation; Negroes and assimilation; Soviet racism; Soviet Jewry; Chinese racism; Apartheid; shared identities; racism inevitable; may be healthy.
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<b>EDUCATION</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2003/11/chapter-48-from-j.html"> <I>48. The New Education</i></a>
<br>(By F. P. JUST)
<br>'Cramming'; intellectual depreciation; no short-cuts; opinionated `experts'; knowledge oldfashioned; radicalism; creativity an apology for mediocrity; a-historical `relevance'; radical propaganda; vague theories taught; store of knowledge; dismay; sex instead of Shakespeare; curricula; external assessment; underlying philosophies; rote; lack of facts; grammar; communication; competition; assignments; order; Dewey's `progressive education'; relevance is hollow without knowledge; indoctrination for Utopias; Curriculum Advisory Board; politicisation; encouragement to laziness; experimentation too careless.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2003/10/chapter-49-from-j.html"><I>49. The Case for Examinations</i></a>
<br>(By F.P. JUST)
<br>Exams not perfect but fair; exams deprecated by educationists; opponents of knowledge; `child centred' education; `self fulfilment'; `how to think'; `personal development'; Marxism in education; `flexibility'; ACER; Radford report; Queensland; class inequalities; shortness of exams; knowledge for its own sake; trained intelligence vital; knowledge dependent on ideology?; justice; actual achievement; hard work making up for lesser ability; class bias; merit by attainment; no exams in schools means low standards for American universities; prediction of tertiary success.
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<b>ASSOCIATED TOPICS</b>
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2003/09/chapter-50-from-j.html"><I>50. Censorship -- a Conservative Viewpoint</i></a>
<br>(By J.H. COURT)
<br>Drawing the line; Spock; conflict of interests; J. S. Mill; freedom; not oppressive in 1974 Australia; no freedom absolute; harm to others; protecting people from themselves; assumptions about the nature of man; morality; political implications; breaking down society; big business; censorship by omission; society vs. the individual; quality control; civilizations; psychological pollution; danger creeping up; expediency; community standards; vigilante law; what people want; ITS and Australian polls; research evidence on harm; American Commission Report; evidence against censorship poor; violence; intuition; dangers from television; myths and legends; evidence for harm 'from pornography; double standards; legal porn versus illegal; prohibition; sex crimes; boredom; benefits from porn; why censorship being challenged; permissiveness as an ideology; Freudianism; Wolpe; Mowrer; existentialism; moral values; spiritual values; Christian guidelines; weakness of man.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/08/new-zealand-psychologist-1974-3-1-21-26.html"><I>51. How Good is the Wilson & Patterson Conservatism Scale?</i> </a>
<br>Wide use; form of measurement; not original; acquiescence; validity; Kerlinger; meaning-opposition; social desirability; samples; factorial structure; revised C -scale.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2008/02/chapter-52-from-j.html"><I>52. Who Are the Alienated?</i> </a>
<br>Radical critique of society; measuring instruments; previous literature; sub-concepts; collection of items; intercorrelations of sub-scales; ITRO; quintessential scale; alienation and radicalism; authoritarianism; balanced scales; alienation and social class; Job dissatisfaction; relative alienation.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/06/chapter-53-from-j.html"><I>53. Moralism and politics</i> </a>
<br>Absolute right and wrong; `rights'; Leftist moralism; moralism and moral conservatism different; Kohlberg; everyday decisions; Technical College students; reliability high; moralism as a delusion; radical behaviour; anti-apartheid movement; sociology students; Attitude to authority; alienation; U-curve relationship with moralism; moralism and social desirability correlate highly; faking good; moralism as persuasion; savagery justified by moralism; `sick' minds; moralism as pragmatism; attitude to morality; radical ambivalence; conditioned emotionalism; childhood deceptions; morality versus understanding.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2008/02/australian-quarterly-volume-44-no.html"> <I>54. Acceptance of Aggression and Australian Voting Preference </I> </a>
<br>Authoritarianism; alienation; psychology of politics; McClosky; forward defence; interpersonal trust; middle class and covert aggression; management students, school teachers, process workers; new scale; voting preference; generalisation from personal to national shown; social class.
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<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2008/02/chapter-55-from-j.html"><I>55. The Tsivitca</i></a>
<br>(By RUTH GRUHN)
<br>Religious cult; exclusivism; self-righteousness; evil; Russian saint; apocalyptic belief; present-oriented; narrow spatial range; demons and ogres; coercion morally right; one source of evil; martyrdom; original sin; conformity; chosen people; proselytism; ceremonies; oratory; personality transformation.
<br><br>
<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2008/02/postscript-chapter-from-j.html"><i>Postscript -- The 1974 Elections</i></a>
<br><br>
<a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/02/consolidated-list-of-references-for.html">Consolidated List of References</a>
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-4312732502883119792008-01-27T23:28:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:29:34.034+10:00<br><br>
<i>Note from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br><br>
<b><font size="5"> Acknowledgements </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
<b><i>Grateful thanks are given to the following for permission to reprint works included in this book:</i></b>
<br><br>
<i>Current Affairs Bulletin</i> (Dept. of Adult Education, University of Sydney).
<br><br>
<i>Nation Review</i> (Incorporated Newsagencies Co., Melbourne).
<br><br>
<i>The Bulletin</i> (Australian Consolidated Press, Sydney).
<br><br>
<i>Sydney Morning Herald</i> (John Fairfax & Sons, Sydney).
<br><br>
<i>Journal of Human Relations</i> (Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio).
<br><br>
Australian Broadcasting Commission.
<br><br>
<i>Newsweek</i> (Newsweek Inc., Madison Ave.. New York).
<br><br>
<i>Daily Mirror</i> (News Ltd., Sydney).
<br><br>
Pan Books, London.
<br><br>
<i>The British Journal of Psychiatry</i> (Royal Medico-Psychological Assoc., London).
<br><br>
<i>Journal of Conflict Resolution</i> (Sage Publications, Beverley Hills, California).
<br><br>
<i>Australian Journal of Psychology</i> (Australian Psychological Assoc., Melbourne).
<br><br>
<i>Patterns of Prejudice</i> (Institute of Jewish Affairs, London)
<br><br>
Australian Council for Educational Standards.
<br><br>
<i>Herald</i> (Herald and Weekly Sun, Melbourne).
<br><br>
<i>Australian Quarterly</i> (Australian Institute of Political Science, Sydney).
<br><br>
<i>Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology</i>
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-80505740526610086482008-01-07T23:27:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:28:13.212+10:00<br><br>
<i>Note from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br><br>
<b><font size="5"> The Authors </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
T. D. Allman is a senior American journalist not normally known for conservative views. In Australia, his contributions are to be found in many publications-including <i>Nation Review</i>.
<br><br>
The late Stewart Alsop was a widely-read American political commentator. He was a regular columnist in <i>Newsweek</i> but was also to be read from time to time in the Australian dailies.
<br><br>
Prof. Max Beloff is the Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration at Oxford Universitv and is fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
<br><br>
Prof S. T. Butler is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Uuiversity of Sydney and writes regularly on science for the layman.
<br><br>
Dr Colin Clark lectures in Economics at Monash University, Melbourne, is an active Catholic lavman and writes prolifically (and unfailingly iconoclastically) on economic topics.
<br><br>
Peter Coleman is a Liberal Party backbencher in the NSW Legislative Assembly, has a degree in economics and has long been associated with <i>Quadrant</i> magazine.
<br><br>
Dr J. H. Court is a lecturer in psychology at Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia.
<br><br>
Dr Brian Crabbe is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Sydney, NSW.
<br><br>
Bob Ellis is perhaps best-known as the film critic for <i>Nation Review</i>.
<br><br>
Alan Fitzgerald is resident satirist for <i>The Bulletin</i> newsmagazine and turns his talent on all parts of the political spectrum.
<br><br>
Prof. Milton Friedman is one of the two or three world's leading economists and is father of the 'monetarist' school, centred at Chicago.
<br><br>
Dr Ruth Gruhn is an anthropologist who specialises in the archaeology and ethnology of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas. A graduate of Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she has taught at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada since 1983.
<br><br>
Judy Johnson is a columnist for the <i>Daily Mirror</i> (Sydney).
<br><br>
Dr F. P. Just lectures in French at Melbourne University. He is a leading figure in the Australian Council for Educational Standards.
<br><br>
Dr J. Martin lectures in Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University, N. Ryde, NSW.
<br><br>
Prof J. W. Nevile is Professor of Economics at the University of New South Wales.
<br><br>
John Ray, although a psychologist by training, is lecturer in Sociology at the University of New South Wales.
<br><br>
Alan Reid is Australia's senior political journalist and is to be seen on the television program "Federal File".
<br><br>
Peter Samuel is an economist by training and a journalist by occupation. He is one of Australia's most prolific and noted writers and is to be read regularly in <i>The Bulletin</i> newsmagazine.
<br><br>
John Sarum is the pseudonym of a recent graduate of the University of New South Wales.
<br><br>
Alvin Toffler is the inventor of the term 'Future shock' -- and author of a book of that name.
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-3095959443055695612007-12-27T23:26:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:26:49.925+10:00<br><br>
<i>From: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
<b><font size="5"> Foreword </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By John Ray
<br><br>
IN THE SOCIAL sciences, and among intellectuals generally, one can detect a quite remarkable consensus on a wide range of issues that can generally be described as 'liberal' if not 'Leftist': Racism is a uniformly bad thing; capital punishment is barbaric; white Rhodesians are villains; BHP makes too much profit; overseas ownership of our industry must be reduced; wage rises for unionists are always just unless the union concerned happens to be the Australian Medical Association; we must conserve our mineral resources; the world is in danger of overpopulation; blacks are just as intelligent as whites; inflation is inevitable without government control of prices; all men should have equal rights unless they happen to be anti-communists; free speech is an inalienable right unless you happen to be the Rhodesia Information Centre; more education is needed; public examinations should be abolished; French nuclear tests are stupid and wicked (but not Chinese tests); the unionists' right to strike must not be interfered with (but they may interfere with others' right to work); Australian industries must be protected from overseas competition; decentralisation is an urgent need; 'the Arts' should be subsidised; we are ruled by a power elite; the workers are alienated; we live in a society that is increasingly conformist; everybody has his own construction of reality, none of which is more valid than any other; man is naturally good, but has been corrupted by "the system"; Marx was a great prophet; science should be relevant; an Arts education promotes critical thought; Vietnam was an American crime motivated by economic self-interest; the West should disarm; armies are not really necessary; police are the sign of a sick society; and competitiveness is the disease of Western society.
<br><br>
Probably very few individuals hold at once all the opinions listed above, and that list itself is but a brief sample of the total field, but none the less, viewpoints such as the above are at the very least much better represented in what social scientists read, write and say than are their contraries. Their contraries are what this book is about.
<br><br>
Social scientists and other intellectuals have created fashions of thought for themselves -- dogmas, creeds and superstitions -- which ought to be challenged by anyone devoted to the truth for its own sake. If social scientists are, as they fancy themselves to be, iconoclasts supreme, they should be careful to set their own house in order first. Before they criticise the rest of society, are their own assumptions open to criticism? I believe they are. Among social scientists, conservatism is the true non-conformity. Through this book it is hoped that all readers will have the opportunity of judging the matter for themselves.
<br><br>
The book is divided (perhaps a little arbitrarily) into two sections: one devoted to popular treatments (generally short) of topical or everyday political issues and the other devoted to longer papers on more academic topics within social science. There is no pretence that the coverage given to the conservative viewpoint in this book is in any way complete. The articles and papers included are simply one selection from a very large universe of possibilities. The guiding rules for selection have centred on the extensiveness of the iconoclasm displayed; its comparative inaccessibility in other sources and its everyday relevance in political debate. Other papers and articles considered but which were excluded for reasons of limited space would alone make up several books as large as the present one.
<br><br>
School of Sociology <br>
University of New South Wales Kensington, N.S.W. <br>
February, 1974. <br>
John J. Ray (M.A., Ph.D. )
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-32260040482520464512007-11-27T23:23:00.001+10:002008-02-27T23:25:12.920+10:00<br><br>
<i>Introduction from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
<b><font size="5"> What is Conservatism? A Personal Preface </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John Ray
<br><br>
There is now an extensive body of evidence, drawn from both Australia and overseas, to suggest that what we today commonly call conservatism is an ideology most strongly held by working-class people. (See Lipset [1960], Eysenck [1971 & 1972], and Chapter 43, Part Two of this book for summaries of some of this evidence.) Except where it would be against their own economic self-interest, the workers are strongly conservative in the social policies they would support. The converse of this, of course, is that radicalism or small 'l' liberalism is very much an upper and middle class phenomenon. After all, both Marx and Engels were bourgeois intellectuals -- not workers.
<br><br>
'But wait a minute!' you might say, 'Everybody knows that the workers support Left wing parties. They're not conservative.' For seventy-five per cent of the workers, this is true. The political party one supports is determined very largely by perceived self- interest -- not by ideology. Ideology may be important to the party workers themselves, but, to the average voter, ideology in any form matters very little. Workers vote for radical parties because such parties offer them a better deal economically. The worker who votes for the Australian Labor Party because it offers him a free health service probably does not agree with the Party's attempts to abolish the White Australia policy. In instances where it does not affect his pocket, the worker is conservative.
<br><br>
By "conservative", however, one means something much more than just adherence to the <i>status quo</i> or defence of some orthodoxy. In fact, the origin of the term conservative in British political life was as much abusive as anything else; it was a term of some derision applied to people with a particular set of beliefs. It just happened that that particular constellation of beliefs corresponded fairly closely to what was already considered accepted practice at that time. I would claim, however, that defence of the <i>status quo</i> is not the basic element of what we call a conservative attitude. In fact, there can be circumstances where a conservative advocates change. A strong conservative would for instance advocate that we allow private enterprise competitors to the Post Office. Given the steadily worsening service provided by our present postal monopoly, such an innovative step may be the only chance we have to get rid of the present bureaucratic inefficiency.
<br><br>
From my own research into people's attitudes, I have come to the Burkean conclusion that a conservative is, above all, someone who has a cynical or hardened view of humanity. (See Chapter 54, Part Two.) Without condemning or disliking man, he believes that man is predominantly selfish and cannot be trusted always to do good. <i>This</i> is what does indeed make the conservative cautious about social change and this therefore is what has given rise to the view that conservatism is merely opposition to any change. By contrast, our considerate radical or small `l' liberal believes that man is inherently good and that this goodness will ensure that no matter what you do with good intentions, the desired effects will in the end be achieved. A good example of this is the classical Marxist formula: 'From each according to his ability and to each according to his need.' The radical seems to assume that the very fact that you are giving goods and services to each according to his need will itself be enough to ensure that everybody produces all that he is able to produce. If man were naturally good, this would indeed be true. Unfortunately, it seems that even the Russians have found that man needs other incentives than those provided by moral suasion. As Bob Ellis once put it rather pessimistically: 'The Left-wing intellectual believes that people are the saints they ought to be rather than the slobs they really are.' In Edmund Burke's (1790) terms, the conservative, by contrast, believes that man is 'imperfectible'.
<br><br>
His characteristic orientation towards man does lay the conservative open to the charge that he is "misanthropic" or even paranoid and there is no shortage of research reports that do claim to have shown that conservatives are so characterised. Such research, however, has as its basic weakness the quite false assumption that to be <i>wary</i> of man is to dislike man. That mankind could be loved despite its faults, just does not appear to come within the range of possibilities that our rigid and moralistic Leftists are able to entertain. The only way they themselves appear to be able to love man is by idealising him. To do so they even use such pathological Freudian devices as denial (i.e. refusing to see or recognise the humanity of what is non-ideal in man). This is summed up in a popular poster: 'I love humanity -- it's just people I can't stand.'
<br><br>
As is implied above, conservatives see themselves as <i>realists</i>, and radicals as, at least temporarily, self-deluded. A New York police chief was quoted in <i>Newsweek</i> recently as saying: 'A conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night: In fact realist could almost be regarded as a code-word to identify conservatives by. Many men who would avoid applying to themselves the socially undesirable label of conservative will be much more forthright in claiming to be realists.
<br><br>
As realists, conservatives are opposed to all sorts of political romanticism --reactionary as well as radical, right wing extremism as well as left wing extremism. Just as conservatives (e.g. Churchill) were opposed to Hitler's romantic attempt to return to ancient Germanic values and life-styles, so they are opposed to the reactionary romanticism of what the Duke of Edinburgh calls 'the stop everything brigade' -- the extremist version of the modern-day 'ecology' movement. Ever since Edmund Burke's pamphlet of 1756 on the topic, conservatives have distrusted these recurrent cycles of enthusiasm for "back to nature" movements -- of which hippies also appear to be a variety. This distrust stems from a belief that the enthusiasts have fallen victim to the delusion of trying to 'have their cake and eat it too' (i.e. they covertly or even overtly want the advantages of civilisation without at the same time being willing to accept its concomitant and necessary disadvantages) .
<br><br>
Perhaps because of my working class origins, I am a Burkean conservative. Edmund Burke I believe to be essentially right and relevant to modern times. I believe that the Vietnam war can be justified, that conscription can be necessary, that most ecology activists are cranks, that the twentieth century is the best century we have ever had and that the twenty-first will be even better, that economic growth is a good thing, that strikers who defy the courts should be outlawed, that the White Australia policy is defensible, that Ian Smith of Rhodesia is neither a fool nor a rogue, that our ties with the monarchy are precious and should not be reduced, that we should have more foreign investment and continued population growth. I am in favour of bigger cities and more home-units. I am in favour of States' rights and against socialism. I am against government-sponsored decentralisation and against government handouts to Aborigines. Name any opinion that is unpopular among intellectuals and I am almost sure to hold it.
<br><br>
And this is the point: Conservatism <b>IS</b> heresy. To hold views such as mine is just not the thing to do amongst "nice" middle class people or amongst intellectuals and academics. Regardless of the support views such as mine might have in a poll of the Australian population at large, one just does not expect to find such views among educated people. The educated people who form opinion and provide leadership to the community regard views like mine as hopelessly outmoded, selfish and morally wrong.
<br><br>
Take the White Australia policy. We have a world full of evidence that white people in general don't like black people. We have all the evidence from other countries that are culturally similar to ours -- Britain, U.S.A., South Africa, Rhodesia -- that mixed races lead to conflict. And yet people deride the White Australia policy. In Al Grassby's words, the policy is "dead". Like most conservatives, however, I just don't like the idea of race riots in Australia -- particularly when it is so unnecessary. If we want to help the poorer peoples of the earth, we can surely do it most economically by giving them the facilities in their own country that they otherwise might want to come here to seek. It is not land that the underdeveloped world needs. It is capital. Many of the densely populated areas of the world are among the most prosperous -Singapore, Holland, Denmark, Hong-Kong, Japan. The difference is that they have acquired a large amount of capital per head. What the Indian farmer needs is not new land but a steel plough instead of a wooden stick.
<br><br>
And what about Vietnam? Was it, as the radicals say, a war of economic self-interest pursued by the American military-industrial complex? I don't think so. It was an engagement initiated by that admitted idealist John F. Kennedy! It was he who first sent in so-called American "advisers". His running-mate and chosen successor L. B. Johnson simply continued the process of escalation that Kennedy had started. It was a war motivated by a genuine and generous American desire, widely shared among the American population, to stop the spread of a totalitarian regime. I would not like to live under a dictatorship and by the direction in which the streams of refugees flow, neither do the South Vietnamese. I therefore support the aims of the Vietnam war. In fact, I would claim that it was an exceptionally unselfish war on the Americans' part. They had comparatively little to gain. North Vietnam was far away and hardly likely to go on and attack North America, and anything America could gain from South Vietnam was a mere trifle compared to what America lost there every day.
<br><br>
The execution of the war was another thing. What defeated America in the end was without a doubt the corrupt government in Saigon. Some Vietnamese thought it was even worse than the North. But what could the Americans do? It was the very idealism that made them go there to defend democracy that prevented them from taking over the South altogether. As it is, the strategy seems to have worked to some extent. A communist takeover seems as remote as ever. I don't know how they could have done any better.
<br><br>
`What about the suffering of the Vietnamese?' someone will say. There we come back to what, in my view, is the essential difference between the conservative and the radical. The radical is much more led by his immediate emotions. The thought of human suffering he cannot abide for any reason whatever. Yet it is a necessarily inconsistent position. I have yet to hear a radical who will not admit that the war against Hitler was a good thing. Indeed it was a matter of survival. If we hadn't fought Hitler, there would be no radicals, and there would certainly be enormous suffering. The answer simply is that suffering may be necessary to prevent further suffering. The conservative can accept and deal with this possibility. The radical would rather avoid the choice altogether and run the risk of jeopardising the future for the sake of giving his twitching little emotions a rest.
<br><br>
And this, it seems, is the reason why, unlike the workers, so many intellectuals and university people are radical. Living in their ivory towers, they have been insulated from the brutality of the workaday world and have not become inured to the necessity and inevitability of suffering. <i>They</i> manage to avoid most of it; why shouldn't the whole world?
<br><br>
The beliefs of university staff [faculty members], however, are important. It is their students who go out and fill top jobs in the public service and the media. Many business leaders and politicians who supposedly represent the worker are nowadays university graduates. So after three or more years of indoctrination, it is no wonder that people who have been through university think that the only intellectually defensible opinions are radical ones. The people with influence, then, acquire from their teachers an orthodoxy that is eventually passed on to the community as a whole. Increasing levels of education mean that more people are exposed to this radical or small 'l' liberal orthodoxy and this in turn explains the steady liberalisation of our culture over the years. Conservatism is heresy because radicalism is orthodoxy.
<br><br>
But surely this is a contradiction in terms: Surely what we mean by heresy is something that goes against convention. Heresy must be radical. The answer of course is that it all depends on your frame of reference. Intellectuals conceive themselves as having to fight against the ignorance of the rest of society. What the intellectual believes, is heretical to the worker and what the worker believes, is heretical to the intellectual.
<br><br>
By now it will perhaps be evident why I prefer to use the term "conservative" solely to refer to the <i>content</i> of beliefs. What makes the person we call a conservative tick is not his opposition to change but the fact that he is <i>emotionally able to acknowledge and deal with the destructiveness and aggressiveness in human nature</i>.
<br><br>
To the radical, destructiveness and aggressiveness are the hardest thing of all to accept. They are the things that make him most uncomfortable. He just cannot deal with them. What, then, does he do when he is forced up against them? Unbelievable as it may be, in one way or the other, he simply denies that destructiveness and aggressiveness exist. He tries to deceive himself, states that people are basically pleasant, considerate, and that any deviation from this is merely a mistake or misunderstanding that can be remedied by education. Of violent criminals the radical says: 'They should be re-educated, not imprisoned.' The faith that a man who just enjoys 'smashing people's faces in' can be cured by education is really childlike. Education might help the criminal to learn more about people's faces but it won't prevent him from enjoying 'smashing them in'.
<br><br>
Sometimes however, this evasion just cannot be maintained. Sometimes the radical is brought face to face with aggression. What does he do then? There is only one way then that he can maintain his delusion about the basic 'niceness' of humanity. He just denies that the aggressor is really human. He treats him as a non-person and cuts off all communication with him. To use a psychologist's term, the radical 'leaves the field'. Hitler is treated this way. Words like monster are used to describe him as if he were a freak genetic accident that didn't really belong to humanity as we know it. And yet what Hitler did is clearly in all of us. Sixty million Germans did his bidding and a large proportion did so willingly, without need of coercion. Pre-war anti-Nazi writers like Roberts admit that Hitler was by far simply the most popular man in Germany. If anybody is inclined to say, 'But we're not like the Germans', just go and listen to the crowd at a professional boxing, wrestling or football match. It may be a harmless way of releasing the aggression, but the aggression is there. The mass popularity of such sports indicates that such aggressiveness is the rule, not the exception. People <i>like</i> seeing boxers trying to physically hurt and maim each other.
<br><br>
The radical's endeavour, his need, to ignore such unpleasant realities cannot of course be adaptive. We don't need to go far back in history to find examples of this. Take the pacifists who reigned supreme in Britain after World War I who because of their own horror at what had happened in that war persuaded themselves there would never be a war again. As a consequence, when Hitler's troops marched into the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles treaty, the pacifists found excuses for him. They refused to believe that he was acting malevolently. Conservatives like Churchill, of course, wanted Hitler stopped there and then before he had the chance to build up his war machine. The pacifists however won the day and eventually all the world had to pay the price for that folly: World War II. If the world had not closed its eyes to what Hitler was doing, they could have stopped him before it was too late.
<br><br>
Just as the conservative Churchill was the most effective and relentless opponent of Hitler's Nazism, so conservatives in general are the most effective opponents of totalitarianism in general. They alone can ideologically afford to recognise and deal with the evil , and oppressive intent of such regimes. By contrast, radical policy is the policy of the ostrich.
<br><br>
Man does, then, have a great deal of evil in him and some human suffering will often be necessary if we are to avoid greater suffering. It is indeed a sad thing that such beliefs are heretical. I believe that they are undeniable truths which we ignore at our peril.
<br><br><br>
<b>POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDA</b>
<br><br>
Full citation details for the references mentioned above can be found <a href="http://consheresy.blogspot.com/2005/02/consolidated-list-of-references-for.html">here</a>
<br><br>
It may be asked whether my above contention that realism -- particularly about human nature -- is basic to conservatism is consistent with my contention <a href="http://ray-dox.blogspot.com/2006/07/monograph-below-monograph-is.html">elsewhere</a> to the effect that respect for the individual and a love of personal liberty is basic to conservatism. Which of the two really is basic -- realism or love of liberty? The simple answer is of course that the two are intimately related. If you are cynical about the good intentions and wisdom of others, you will want the individual to be as free from the attentions of others as possible. A more precise answer, however, is that realism and its attendant cynicism is the <i>motive</i> and advocacy of liberty is the <i>result</i>. Putting it another way, liberty is <i>what</i> conservatives advocate and realistic cynicism is <i>why</i> they advocate it. Putting it yet another way, liberty is basic to conservative <i>politics</i> and realism is basic to conservative <i>psychology</i>.
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-57224464028967834502007-10-27T23:21:00.001+10:002008-02-27T23:22:31.001+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 1 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
<b><font size="4"> ARE PEOPLE POLLUTION? </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By John Ray
<br><br>
<i>People create resources</i>
<br><br>
IN THE PROFESSIONAL literature of social science, 'misanthropy' is treated as a form of personality disturbance or maladjustment. It could in fact be argued that for a highly social creature like man, a generalised aversion for his own species would be the ultimate form of maladjustment.
<br><br>
It is interesting therefore to note that there could be few more specifically misanthropic utterances than 'people are pollution' -- which is, of course, the slogan of the fashionable Zero Population Growth movement.
<br><br>
The recent announcement that America's birth rate has dropped to only the replacement rate may indicate that this movement now has to be taken seriously.
<br><br>
If any further evidence for the obsessional neuroticism of this movement were needed, it could be found in the amazing way it treats the entire world population as an undifferentiated, featureless gruel. Because the world population overall is expanding steadily, it is argued that therefore we in Australia should limit our numbers!
<br><br>
This is to regard Australia as being in the same situation as Bangladesh -- which we most evidently are not. If love of sweeping generalisations were the basis for comparison, the ZPG movement could well be compared with Hitler's Nazism.
<br><br>
Indeed ZPG is more extreme. Hitler only generalised about 'Jews' and 'Aryans'. ZPG generalises about 'people'. It should be noted however that the offering of simplistic solutions to complex social problems is characteristic of most messianic cults -- from Communism to Jehovah's witnesses.
<br><br>
The apology that ZPG spokesmen offer for saying that we are in the same boat as the underdeveloped nations is that we use up far more of the world's resources. This thinking however is equally limited. What they omit to say is that resources are not static and most of them we in the West in fact <i>created</i>.
<br><br>
Nothing is a resource until you find a way of putting it to use. Bauxite wasn't a resource until Hall and Heroult discovered a way of extracting aluminium from it. Most of Europe's iron ore wasn't a resource until the Thomas steel process was invented.
<br><br>
We have no reason to believe that this process of resource creation won't continue. In fact, with the increasing level of education in our population, we might reasonably expect it to increase as never before. If it is resources we lack, the way to get them is to increase the population in that part of the world which creates them. The more people of Western European origin we have, the more Einsteins and other resource creators we can expect to have.
<br><br>
Because of just this one man, Einstein, even seawater is now a resource of incalculable value. If we run out of petroleum, it is hydrogen from seawater that will fuel our cars. And how will we get the power to extract the hydrogen? From nuclear power and probably even from thermonuclear power.
<br><br>
Even the Club of Rome didn't attempt to tell us how long we would take to run out of seawater! And note also that when it becomes commercial, thermonuclear power will not create radio-active waste products.
<br><br>
ZPG proponents of course almost entirely ignore technological growth and the consequent resource growth. Manifesting a truly neurotic sense of insecurity, they say that technological growth is too unpredictable. We have to base our planning on what we know, now, to exist.
<br><br>
In doing this they place themselves in precisely the same position as Malthus. It is precisely because he ignored technological growth that his predictions proved so ludicrous. Malthus, however, had an excuse. He had never heard of technological growth. By contrast, when ZPG proponents ignore it, they do so deliberately.
<br><br>
We can see how absurd it is to treat our resources as fixed if we look at any of the many previous false prophecies of doom that have been made based on such an assumption. Where would we be if we had heeded those prophecies? In fact -- as the Americans showed with the Manhattan project and many subsequent projects --technological growth can be turned on largely at will simply by pouring more resources into research.
<br><br>
Note that in such a context what is meant by resources is man-hours. If one wished to fight slogan with slogan, one might reply to the ZPG slogan by saying that 'our basic resource, in fact, is people'. This being so, we want more of them, not less.
<br><br>
Of course, the people we want more of are those who will be educated to their maximum potential. That certainly leaves out most of the underdeveloped world. For them, even ZPG may not be the way forward. They may need population decline <font color="#ff0000">[1]</font>. Such a prescription may leave a nasty taste in the mouth, but if it is the surest way to cure the patient, surely that is what matters.
<br><br>
<i>'Populate or perish'?</i>
<br><br>
Australia is one of the few countries that have long had an explicit and 'thought-out' population policy. In Australia, then, the ZPG movement might be expected to meet some opposition instead of merely filling a gap that was not filled before. To use the biological metaphors of which ZPG people seem to be particularly fond, the 'ecological niche' of population policy is not empty in Australia. Before the new species ('People are pollution") can flourish, the old species ('Populate or perish') must be subdued. My aim is to help the old species avoid such extinction.
<br><br>
Briefly, there was for long a bipartisan consensus in Australia that our vast and empty land was a prize, eyed enviously by the teeming hordes of Asia and that the inevitable invasion from that source could be either staved off, or more effectively countered, by filling this land with many more people of our own kind. Australia had, in a word, a maximum population growth policy predicated on strategic considerations. This maximum, in practical terms, was taken to be an overall growth rate of two per cent per annum. Higher growth than this was taken to be too ambitious and potentially disruptive. Since such a rate of growth was considerably higher than the rate of natural increase, the gap was to be made up by officially encouraged immigration from European sources. As described, this was the policy introduced after the second world war by Mr Arthur Calwell, the Labor Party Minister for Immigration. The same policy was followed by his conservative successors. I would like to argue that that policy is as appropriate today as it was then.
<br><br>
Even before the ZPG movement came along, there had arisen some opposition to this traditional policy on economic and social grounds. Migrants were said to be living in 'ghettoes' (<i>nobody</i> favoured that) and were not adapting to the problems of life in their new country. It was also said that migration imposed a special burden on the economy in requiring it to supply larger amounts of social overhead capital (roads and schools for example) than would have been otherwise necessary.
<br><br>
The first of these two lines of criticism I have little dispute with. Originally, there were two prongs to Australia's population policy: encouragement of domestic population growth and encouragement of immigration. The erosion of the first prong meant that undue emphasis was given to the second. The mechanism for encouraging domestic population growth was the 'child endowment' system. This was a system of payments to mothers designed to minimise the economic burden of having children. Over the last twenty years, however, the payments made under this system have barely been increased, even though there has been substantial inflation and a substantial rise in the standard of living over the same period. This has resulted in a payment that was once a substantial contribution to the child's upkeep becoming now only the most token sum. I would favour the resurrection of child endowment as a meaningful redistributive mechanism. <font color="#ff0000">[2] </font>
<br><br>
Much of the problem of migrant 'ghettoes' has arisen because of the declining standards that have been applied to the recruitment of migrants. The increasing standards of living in Europe have meant that Australia became less attractive in relative terms. Given Australia's own declining birthrate, this meant that in recent years more and more migrants had to be found from sources that were increasingly drying up. In the circumstances, any pretence of maintaining standards against which migrants had to measure up became increasingly (if not resoundingly) hollow. And yet these 'standards' are vital. They concern precisely what has given cause for disquiet: the prospect that the migrant will adjust satisfactorily to life in Australia. Language is the most obvious of such standards. A non-English speaking person will have difficulties that will need to be compensated by other attributes such as willingness to learn. A person who is non-English speaking, poorly educated, with few vocational skills and who comes from a peasant society is obviously going to be a problem to both himself and his host country if he is encouraged to migrate -- and yet Australia has in recent years accepted legions of such migrants. No wonder there are 'ghettoes'. The domestic birthrate should have been encouraged instead of accepting so many migrants unsuited to living here happily <font color="#ff0000">[3]</font>. Revive the child endowment program. To sloganise: 'The best New Australian (an Australian euphemism for 'migrant' ) is the one who is born here.'
<br><br>
There is, of course, no guarantee that restoration of realistic child endowment will in fact raise the birthrate by the required amount. Many years of strenuous pro-natalist policy in France had little success. Nonetheless, it is known that the birthrate is in the long term responsive to perceived economic circumstances. During the Great Depression, for instance, the birthrate dropped below the replacement level. Reviving child endowment is at least worth trying. One can, for instance, argue that the failure of French pro-natalism was precisely because it happened to be accompanied by economic depression.
<br><br>
The economic arguments against immigration are a different matter however, They are much more specious. Migration does mean that we have to spend more on social infrastructure. This, however, would be true of population increase from any source. Only a static population would allow us to spend less. This would mean that instead of building new facilities we would have to spend only to maintain or improve existing facilities. A static population would, in theory, allow more diversion of capital resources into directly productive investments and hence we would have higher per capita living standards. There are two broad classes of saving brought about by static population levels: saving on upbringing and education costs due to the smaller number of children required in the population and the aforementioned savings on investment in new social overhead capital works. With reference to migration, it should be noted that we are getting the former for free. By bringing in migrants to swell our population, we are getting the education and upbringing of the person concerned at no cost to us. In economist's terms, we are being given large amounts of human capital. All we have to find is the social overhead capital.
<br><br>
There are then costs in population growth -- economic costs as well as the aesthetic and ecological costs mentioned by ZPG proponents. These costs to us, however, are decreased, not increased, by finding part of one's population increment through immigration.
<br><br>
The real question in the population issue is not whether growth has costs or not, but whether those costs are outweighed by advantages. To listen to the ZPG evangelists, one would think that population growth had no advantages. One cannot expect Lucifer to expatiate on the good points of Jehovah. It is the purpose of this chapter, however, to set out what some of the advantages in growth are.
<br><br>
The first such advantage was the general one given at the outset: that population growth gives more resource creators and that, historically, the resources so created have been outstripping the resources used up at an ever increasing rate. Our living standards would be no higher than our grandfathers' if it were not so. Historically, growth of living standards has always been accompanied by increasing population --not static or declining population. One notable exception to this is postwar Japan. Japan's culture is, however, a highly derivative one -- it borrows what others have created. Moreover, their industrial workforce has been expanding rapidly in spite of the static overall population. This is because of the increasing employment of women and the vast reduction of the workforce required on the increasingly mechanised farms.
<br><br>
In Australia, these general reasons for growth are reinforced by certain other local reasons. The first of these is of course the one embodied in the slogan at the head of this section: Populate or perish. However true it might or might not be that ZPG is an appropriate policy for America and Europe, it is scarcely appropriate for Australia. Half of Australia's population is concentrated in the two large cities of Sydney and Melbourne. Outside such centres Australia is largely empty. Practically all of Australia's rural land is extensively rather than intensively farmed. A dozen more cities such as Sydney and Melbourne would scarcely make a dent in the amount of land available for rural use. Darwin could be expanded to the size of Sydney with no trouble at all. 'But who would want Darwin the size of Sydney?' say the trendies. 'Most Australians' is the evident answer.
<br><br>
It is notable that people who condemn big cities seldom take any steps to leave them. In Australia, there are a range of cities in all shapes and sizes. No matter what you consider to be the ideal size, you can find one to suit you. Why don't the trendies go there? Why don't they leave their terrace houses in the heart of the Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas and go to Perth, Toowoomba, Hobart, Townsville or Gympie? <i>They do not go because the big city has advantages that they cannot do without</i>. When it comes to voting with their feet, it is not hard to see where their preferences really lie. <i>Urban sprawl, urban blight, traffic congestion, air pollution</i> are their plaintive and parrotlike cries, but still they stay put. Surely this is something requiring explanation. The answer is an easy one: we would all like to have our cake and eat it too. Of course the city has the disadvantages mentioned but those disadvantages are the concomitant of the positive advantages that cities confer. It is difficult to have one without the other.
<br><br>
What are the advantages that cities have which continually draw people into them? If they can be summed up in one word, that word is variety. Cities offer variety of employment, entertainment, society and opportunities generally. They offer people, people in abundance, and it is from people that we draw our rewards and our sense of meaning in life. More mundanely it is generally easier to get a job to suit one's own particular needs and abilities in a large city. Employment seems to be the most frequently mentioned reason for people moving to or staying in the city. London is widely said to be a more interesting and rewarding city than Sydney. Why? Simply because it is bigger and hence has more scope for variety. People <i>love</i> big cities -- the protestations of the trendies notwithstanding.
<br><br>
'But could we feed more people?' some will ask. One might as well have asked Arthur Calwell back in the 'forties whether he thought Australia could feed twice the number of people it had then. We know now that it can; and feed them at a higher standard than ever before. More people means more production, more food, more everything. Those extra people don't just sit around and twiddle their thumbs. With some notable exceptions, they work.
<br><br>
'But land area does not expand. Surely applying more and more people to the same amount of land must lead to diminishing returns for each extra man put to work!', some will no doubt say. In so saying they are indeed relying on a classic economic proposition. It is precisely the proposition that Malthus relied upon in coming to his conclusions; conclusions that time has shown to be hilariously pessimistic. As mentioned before, what Malthus overlooked was technological growth. More people means more technologists (not only in absolute, but also in relative terms) and more technologists means more technological growth.
<br><br>
In general, then, as one part of the resources generating sector of the world, Australia has good cause to favour population growth from all sources, but particularly from the domestic birthrate. Except insofar as it raises the educational standards among the children of migrants, the encouragement of immigration from one part of the developed world (Europe) to another does nothing for the world resources generation process.
<br><br>
Where migration does provide a clear gain, however, is in the economic and strategic fields. The economic reason for encouraging population growth, even above what the domestic birthrate can provide, centres around the pervasiveness of barriers to international trade. All countries find themselves under pressure from their domestic manufacturers and producers to protect the local industry. To varying degrees, governments succumb to this pressure. What they do is build barriers against selected imports in the form of customs tariffs. The practice is so well entrenched and so widespread it seems as inevitable as death and taxes. What concerns us in this, however, is that what other people regard as imports are to us exports. When other countries keep out foreign imports, it may well be our exports that are being affected. As we shall see, this is an especially serious matter for a small country.
<br><br>
The efficiency of many modern industries increases as the industries grow larger. The reasons are to be found in any elementary economics textbook and go under the name of 'economies of scale'. Henry Ford's invention of mass production, and the high turnover and low prices of Woolworths are popular examples. This means that an industry with a small home market can never become as efficient as the same industry in a larger country, unless the industry in the smaller country can expand its output by exporting. As we have seen there are very often barriers built to prevent the small country industry from taking the export escape route. The result is that the industry is permanently condemned to lower efficiency and higher costs. This means that it, in turn, must be protected by the smaller country's government so that the customers will not all turn to the cheaper product imported from the larger country. The upshot, as we see it in the Australian automobile industry for instance, is that the inhabitants of the smaller country end up having to pay far more than they otherwise might for what they want to buy. Smallness makes us poor. By growing larger we become richer.
<br><br>
It may be asked, 'What about Sweden and China?' thus naming a very rich small country and a very poor large country. The answer is that size is only one of the determinants of affluence. In fact, the single most important factor is probably the educational level of the population. Other things being equal, however, size must have the effect described above. It is certainly one respect where we in Australia are presently at a disadvantage.
<br><br>
The strategic reason for increasing our population is the obvious one that it lends more hands to our defence. This traditional reason is nowadays likely to be ridiculed among intellectuals, but I would submit that it is now as realistic as ever it was. The betrayal of Israel by Japan and Europe (including Britain) when threatened by Arab countries with an oil embargo shows vividly how small countries cannot rely on international aid to ensure their defence. If their own self-interest is sufficiently threatened, larger countries will abandon all their high-minded principles overnight. For us to rely on such principles as a guarantee of our security would be ostrich-like folly. Like Israel, small countries must be able to look after themselves. If in twenty years time China (to name one possible example) has built herself a powerful navy and sets sail for our shores, how well could we rely on the U.S.A. to come to our aid? The U.S.A. aided Israel because the oil embargo had so little effect on America's own situation. That would not be so if the U.S.A. were faced with the threat of a nuclear attack by Chinese missiles. China already has such missiles. What would the U.S.A. do if faced with a Chinese threat of: 'Don't intervene or else...'? Obviously, we cannot rely on the American response. We must be as ready as possible to defend ourselves. Having the manpower is a vital ingredient of such preparation. If size makes us richer, it also makes us safer.
<br><br>
Some will scoff that the scenario outlined above is a highly unlikely one. Australia seems safe from any threat for many years to come. Such optimism is ludicrous. Wars and revolutions can change the international scene overnight. Population policy, by contrast, is a necessarily long-range affair. Even if Australia is safe for the next fifteen years, what about after that? Even fifteen years is scant time to do much about our population. No, the only safe policy is an unremitting commitment to maximum growth.
<br><br>
'What if all the world thought that way?' some might say. The answer is that what is true for Australia is not necessarily true for others. Again, the optimal policies for the developed and the underdeveloped worlds are different. In this case what is true for Australia is also largely true for the U.S.A., but it is certainly not true for China, Brazil, India or Indonesia. The latter countries already have the maximum advantage they could extract from sheer size and manpower. Their urgent need is to educate the people they already have and provide them with modern machines and tools (or weapons) to work with. The U.S.A., Europe, Australia and Japan, by contrast, have already extracted practically all the advantage they can from education and modernism, and for them the most obvious way forward is an increase in sheer numbers.
<br><br>
'But is all this politically realistic? Can we honestly expect the underdeveloped world to limit its numbers if we fail to limit ours? Surely we have to set an example!' These questions are rather plaintive cries at best. Their total vacuity is exposed when we realise that we are already in precisely the position advocated above. Already China and India have active birth control programs while we in the 'West' do not. The so-called political impossibility is already a political reality.
<br><br>
None of the above is to assert that population growth can go on indefinitely in a fixed area without undesirable consequences. Even underpopulated areas of the world such as Australia and the U.S.A. would, in the very long run, come to the point of standing room only. This very long run involves hundreds of years however. Therefore we cannot practically plan for it. Our distant descendants will be in a much better position to deal with any such problem both by reason of being nearer to it and by reason of possessing more advanced technologies. Long before the standing room only problem arises they will take steps to forestall it. Not having the technology of the future, we cannot know what those steps will be. It would be extremely surprising if, in hundreds of years time, humanity has not expanded to the other planets. It would be all very well if we could now take intelligent steps to plan for the distant future, but given the incredibly rapid changes constantly occurring in human society, anyone who thinks he can so plan is just misleading himself.
<br><br>
The pollution problem, however, is one that we can deal with now and it should be clearly evident that population limitation is a hopelessly indirect and unnecessarily severe way of accomplishing it. The answer to pollution is surely pollution control-not misanthropy. Pollution control is the ultimate luxury. It is very dubious whether Joe the Worker would rather have cleaner air or a new car. I am inclined to think that cleaner air is simply the preoccupation of those who have practically everything else they could want already. At any event, like all luxuries it has its costs and, if it is strongly enough desired, communities will be prepared to pay those costs. I am strongly in favour of pollution control and if the whole community can, via the political process, be cheated into paying for my middle class preferences, I for one would find it hard to resist. The connection between pollution and population, however, is far from a necessary one. Nor should we assume that pollution is a penalty of modernity. For hundreds of years London was one of the world's most polluted cities. Smog killed thousands and the Thames was empty of life. Now, after pollution control legislation, the skies are blue and London is probably the best big city in the world to do your breathing in. There are even fish in the Thames again. This clearly shows that pollution control can work and that pollution is not an inevitable consequence of large concentrations of people. Indeed, the example of London convinces me that as we become more numerous and more- affluent we will become more pollution conscious and pollution will decrease -- not increase.
<br><br>
In summary, population policy must be tailored to the needs of each particular nation. As attractive as the romantic and reactionary generalisations of the ZPG movement might be, they seriously distort the facts. We of the Western world are consistently adding to the world's resources -- not using them up. If the underdeveloped world wants the prosperity that our patio intellectuals affect to scorn, it must pray for more of us not fewer of us. We alone can create the resources that they need.
<br><br>
--------------------------------
<br><br>
The first section of this chapter originally appeared as an article in <i>Nation Review</i>, 4 May 1973, p. 882.
<br><br><br>
<b>POST-PUBLICATION UPDATE</b>
<br><br>
The "Zero population growth" slogan has faded out of politics in the 21st century -- as well it should. As I pointed out above, zero population growth had already arrived in the Western world by the 70s. The ZPG brigade were agitating for something that already existed! I guess that must have dawned on them eventually.
<br><br>
BUT the Zero Population Growth nutters <i>are</i> still with us as just one part of the Greenie movement -- and they still have their "people are pollution" attitudes. Only by now they want to HALVE our population! And it does seem to be the old gang from the 1960's again -- including Paul Ehrlich. The abject failure of their earlier prophecies -- e.g. that we would all be doomed by the mid 1970s -- has not dampened them down a bit. <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DEAF.htm">"Spiked"</a> has a critique of them and makes a historical point in reply: "Rising living standards and rising populations go hand-in-hand." But the doomsters ignore history, of course. They even ignore the present! The world's population has never been so large -- and prosperity worldwide has never been so great. Even India and China are forging ahead now that they have unleashed capitalism.
<br><br>
<b>Footnotes:</b>
<br><br>
<font color="#ff0000">[1]</font>. I had in mind here China's "one child" policy -- mentioned later in the chapter.
<br><br>
<font color="#ff0000">[2]</font>. There have subsequently been increases in Australian child support payments but the most striking innovation in the policy area concerned has been the system instituted by the Howard government of paying mothers thousands of dollars for each new baby born -- a policy that does seem to have had some effect in increasing births. So there has now been official recognition of my argument above that encouraging births among the existing population is desirable.
<br><br>
<font color="#ff0000">[3]</font>. Fortunately, the children of the Southern European immigrants being referred to above did adapt perfectly well to Australian society. A broadly similar cultural background and assimilationist government policies undoubtedly helped in that.
<br><br>
Generalizing that experience to the children of Muslim immigrants in a situation where government policy favours multiculturalism rather than assimilation would be most incautious. And there would now seem to be clear evidence that many young Australians of Muslim origins have NOT adapted well to the Australian scene -- given the high rate of unemployment, lower educational achievement and higher rate of crime in such communities.
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-66270472311502159802007-09-27T23:19:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:20:35.958+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 2 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br><br>
<b><font size="5"> Will Population Growth Lead to Famine or Plenty? </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By COLIN CLARK
<br><br>
IN 1949 The United Nations called a scientific conference on the conservation and utilisation of resources (called UNSCUR for short). I was asked to present a paper to the Plenary Session. In fact, my paper turned out to be unduly pessimistic --I overestimated the capital requirements of the developing countries, and consequently underestimated the rate of economic progress which they were to attain in the subsequent decades.
<br><br>
But that is not the main point of the story. If occurred to me recently to look at the table of the estimates of remaining world mineral resources which were presented to the 1949 conference[1], and which were then accepted without question. I took these figures and subtracted from them the amount which we have in fact mined since 1949. From this calculation I find that we ran out of lead and zinc some years ago, and are just now running out of copper.
<br><br>
Now we are presented with a fresh set of figures, again showing that we are likely to run out of these metals in twenty-five or thirty years. There is no real reason for believing them, any more than there was for believing the figures put before us in 1949. It may be that geologists know a little more about their science now than they did then, though not all that much. The truth of the matter is that: (i) most of the world has not yet been explored for minerals, (ii) methods of mineral extraction and refining are all the time improving, and many ores regarded as unworkable in the past have now become workable.
<br><br>
From the way Dr Ehrlich writes he seems to think that things will go on as before until we come up against a complete lack of minerals, or food, or both, and that then civilisation will suddenly collapse. If there were any truth in his ideas about resources (in fact they are completely mistaken) it would not happen this way at all. The supply of minerals and food would become progressively more limited, not disappear suddenly, and there would be a marked rise in their prices. In the case of minerals, this would lead to much more economical use, the development of substitutes of all kinds, and the careful re-cycling of used products.
<br><br>
I believe that those who are talking about the approaching exhaustion of world resources are insincere. If they really believed all they are saying, they would be hurrying out to buy mining shares, and agricultural land, both of which can now be obtained cheaply. I have not heard of any of them doing it. In fact, they probably realise at the back of their minds that the low prices of mining shares and of agricultural land indicate that the world will be faced, at any rate for some years into the future, not by any threat of shortage of resources, but by an embarrassing superabundance.
<br><br>
Dr Ehrlich has published two principal books in this field <i>Population Resources Environment</i> and <i>The Population Bomb</i>. The former is a long and carefully prepared book. It is a strange mixture of scientific statements, supported by tables and diagrams, and quoting sources of information (though generally failing to give precise references), mixed with a number of errors of fact, and a great many unsupported speculations. In <i>The Population Bomb</i> the content of genuine science is much less, and the errors of fact more numerous, mixed with a great deal of what is frankly science fiction. It is this book unfortunately which has had by far the wider circulation.
<br><br>
<i>Storm on the screen</i>
<br><br>
In August 1971 Dr Ehrlich visited Australia, and I was invited to take part in a television debate with him. The usual Monday Conference procedure is to have four or five people around a table who can debate an issue thoroughly through question and answer. At the last moment this arrangement was changed. It became a show with about one hundred participants, the object apparently being to give Dr Ehrlich and his supporters about ninety per cent of all the available time. However I was able to challenge him on his basic error of fact.
<br><br>
In <i>The Population Bomb</i> he had stated that in the developing countries 'food production every year falls further behind burgeoning population growth'. Many people believe this to be the case. But the facts are the opposite. In the developing countries, with very few exceptions (and these can all be explained by political disorders) food production is increasing substantially faster than population [2]. Dr Ehrlich could not deny this. He tried to divert the issue, however, by saying that the developing countries were suffering from a shortage of 'first-class protein'. This phrase is generally understood to mean protein from animal sources.
<br><br>
If this is what he meant, physiologists would disagree. It is true that it was at one time believed that we needed to obtain a substantial proportion of our protein requirements from animal sources. But estimates of our requirements of animal protein have been steadily diminishing. A little late in the day, physiologists have discovered that there are communities of vegetarians, some for religious and some for economic reasons, who lead healthy lives with intakes of animal protein, in some cases, exceptionally small [3].
<br><br>
Dr Ehrlich makes the extraordinary statement that Japan, despite her apparent wealth, is 'desperate for protein'. Somebody ought to tell him that for years Australia has been trying to sell Japan meat, and Japan has been refusing to take it.
<br><br>
It is true that animal protein has a higher coefficient of biological value than vegetable protein, generally about by the factor of three to two. But the widely held belief that Asian diets are inadequate in protein, and need supplementation by fishmeal, dried milk and other commodities which Australia might be able to provide, has recently been sharply questioned by the leading scientists in this field [4]. The conclusion is that what Asian countries need is rather more of their present diets, perhaps with slight protein supplementation. It is true that there has been medical diagnosis of widespread protein deficiency in Asia; but this has now been shown to be mainly a consequence of inability to assimilate protein when the diet lacks adequate calories.
<br><br>
In 1972 Dr Ehrlich re-published <i>Population Resources Environment</i>. The erroneous statement about food production in developing countries falling behind population growth was withdrawn, and the correct information substituted. Little was said on the question of protein, apparently indicating that Dr Ehrlich does not feel very strongly now on this subject either. Unfortunately however it is <i>The Population Bomb</i>, containing this (and many other) erroneous statements, which continues to circulate.
<br><br>
Having been proved wrong on his facts, Dr Ehrlich has resorted to speculations. Scientific writings may contain: (i) observed facts, (ii) theories which will receive general scientific support, though still not to be regarded as final, and (iii) speculations-which ought to be kept as few in number as possible. 'Hypotheses should not be multiplied beyond necessity'-- Occam's Principle, which is still a basic principle of science. Unfortunately, many people reading the writings of certain scientists seem unable to distinguish between facts, established theories and speculations. (I have some advantage in this respect because, although for many years my profession has been economics) my basic training was as a scientist, including a year's laboratory research work.) Dr Ehrlich's rejoinder to Mr Maddox is almost entirely theoretical, and pretty unsupported speculations at that. We are doing things which 'may increase' cancers, birth defects and deformities. The whole text is full of 'may-bes'.
<br><br>
However I agree with Dr Ehrlich on one point when he says that it is utterly wrong to allow human action to lead to the complete extirpation of any biological species. The reason why it is so wrong is because man is thereby wantonly destroying God's handiwork. However Dr Ehrlich would probably be very annoyed at receiving support from such a direction.
<br><br>
There is a curious and inconclusive debate between Dr Ehrlich and Mr John Maddox, each accusing the other (but Dr Ehrlich using particularly insulting language) of failing to understand the principles of demography. Are there signs that the rate of world population growth may slow down? (whether or not this is desirable we will discuss later). Dr Ehrlich thinks that even the industrial countries may continue for a long time in the future to show rates of increase of 0.5-1 per cent per year. This implies net reproduction rates between 1.2 and 1.3 approximately. Nearly all industrial countries (except Australia) now appear to be well below these levels [5].
<br><br>
Dr Ehrlich quotes a study by Keyfitz, though the same was done more thoroughly by Bourgeois-Pichat [6]. This study was provoked by a statement by General Draper, President Nixon's representative to the United Nations Population Commission. At a ceremonial dinner (!) the gallant General pointed out that not only did the United States intend to adopt a zero population growth policy itself, but also expected Latin America to do so by the end of the century. Bourgeois-Pichat points out that he did not make it clear (perhaps his own mind was not qualified to understand the difference) whether he meant an actual equality between births and deaths by the year 2000, or that the average size of the Latin American family would have been brought down to replacement level (2.2 average offspring approximately) by that date.
<br><br>
Bourgeois-Pichat illustrated, the problem by relation to Mexico, where the average family numbers five or six. If it was seriously intended that Mexico should reach equality between births and deaths by the year 2000, this could be attained only by the immediate reduction of the average family to 0.6 offspring, or a little over one-tenth of its former size.
<br><br>
If on the other hand General Draper's policy was that Mexico, and the rest of Latin America, should reduce the average size of a family to replacement level by the end of the century (and Dr Ehrlich is right in pointing out that this is in fact most unlikely to happen) this would mean that it would be about the middle of the twenty-first century before Latin American population would stabilise, and at a level of about three times what it is now.
<br><br>
Mr Maddox is right in pointing out that there have been falls in fertility in some Asian countries, besides Japan. Indeed, these falls have been sudden and violent, particularly in Taiwan and Singapore. But these relate only to the minority of Asians who have come most under Western influence. The main masses of population in Asia, Africa and Latin America are continuing to grow rapidly.
<br><br>
<i>Imprecise statement</i>
<br><br>
To say that a fall in fertility followed the industrialisation of Western Europe and North America is not a sufficiently precise statement, and does not yet give us grounds for saying that it will necessarily happen elsewhere. The theory that fertility will fall as a consequence of the reduction in infant mortality, when parents have greater expectation that their children may survive, is an idea which has fascinated many demographers; but they have been quite unable to prove it satisfactorily from the evidence.
<br><br>
We must first go back a bit farther. Population growth was not a consequence of industrialisation, as Malthusian theory supposes, but one of its principal causes. The historical evidence now seems clear, that an acceleration of population growth preceded industrialisation; and this was not due to any increase in the size of family, or earlier marriage, but simply to a decline in mortality. (The outstanding case where population growth did not promote industrialisation, namely Ireland, is explained by the deliberate blocking of Irish industrialisation by the British Parliament.)
<br><br>
The decline in fertility appeared in Britain quite suddenly in the 1870s, after more than a century of industrialisation. In Germany and Italy it did not appear until the end of the century. In the United States it appeared about 1830 in the North East, but not until very much later in the West. Japanese family limitation began in the 1920s. In France, on the other hand, the evidence is quite clear that the decline in family size began about 1780, long before the country was industrialised [7]. There is no simple sequence here for Asian and other countries to copy.
<br><br>
No French historian or sociologist has yet explained the very early appearance of family limitation in that country-though most of them regret the consequences. The best analysis of the historical causes of family limitation is probably that of Carr-Saunders, who found the causes not to be economic, but sociological. First there is the 'nuclear family', i.e. parents and dependent children only, not the usual rule, but the exception in former days, when families included grandparents, uncles, cousins, unmarried sisters and the like. The old-style rural family may not have been very productive economically; but it was (and is in present-day Asia and Africa) much easier to bring up children in this milieu than it is with us, where the parents have to carry the entire economic and social responsibility.
<br><br>
The next point to which Carr-Saunders drew attention was the prohibition by law (or strong discouragement by social custom) of child labour. With this usually also goes the obligation to send children to school. If you do not intend to educate your children, they soon become economic assets in a farm family. It used to be estimated, in medieval Europe, that by the time a child reached the age of seven the work he did on the farm outweighed the cost of his keep. This may be even more so in many regions in Asia, where the monsoon season is extremely short, and the enforced idleness of the long dry season gives place to a short spell of urgent labour shortage, when even children's hands are valuable.
<br><br>
And we need not go so far back as medieval Europe. Sir Edward Kerry, giving evidence in the 1830s to the Parliamentary Commission on the Government of New South Wales, reported that 'the lower class of settler' had a strong incentive not to send his children to school, because he needed their help on his farm [8].
<br><br>
But even more important is the absence of social services. We take it for granted that if we become infirm or ill there will be some sort of pension for us, not adequate by our standards, but enough to keep us from starving. In Asia, if you grow old without a family to provide for you, you starve --literally. I was once talking to an Indian woman doctor in Lucknow who was a great advocate of family limitation, and was very annoyed when her woman servant (probably miserably underpaid) conceived another child. 'Why should I not have another child? the servant asked humbly. 'The Government of India does not want you to have children' the doctor sternly replied. 'Will the Government of India look after me when I am old?' the servant asked.
<br><br>
We find it very hard to understand that the thousands of millions of people living in poor peasant communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America have their children because they want them, for these reasons, and will continue to do so for a long time in the future -- until they have replaced the security provided by the extended family, have instituted universal schooling and forbidden, child labour, and have established old-age pensions and other social security measures.
<br><br>
In Japan, universal schooling was enacted as early as 1890 (probably the principal factor in Japan's extraordinary economic progress), but old-age pensions did not come until about a generation later. For these provisions to become universal throughout the under-developed world may take fifty years -- I do not see that anyone could put it at less than twenty-five. And even after that, the decline in family size will be slow. The world is still due for an immense increase in population.
<br><br>
But, although most people think the opposite, all the facts indicate that this will be accompanied by a much more than proportionate increase in wealth. The present rate of rapid increase in the world's population began only about 1945; and during these recent decades the rate of the whole world's economic progress has been far higher than it ever was in the past. India in particular, in spite of all the economic mistakes she has made, is now raising production <i>per head</i> about three times as rapidly as in previous decades, or than the rate which even the most optimistic Indian economists were willing to estimate when the country first became independent in 1947. And if we classify the developing countries by their rates of population growth, those with the highest rate of population growth show on the average the highest rate of growth of production per head-the precise opposite of what Malthusian theory would indicate.
<br><br>
<i>Having it both ways</i>
<br><br>
Among the advanced countries, Japan is often quoted as an example of reduced population growth leading to increased prosperity. But for the last twenty years Japan has been having it both ways, by drawing on her demographic capital. The Japanese have raised many fewer children. They still have relatively few pensioners to support --the balance will be quite different in the next generation. But industrially, meanwhile, they have had all the advantages of a rapidly increasing population, with children born in the previous decades coming into the work force, married women going out to work, and farmers coming into the towns. The result of all this has been that the industrial labour force in Japan has <i>doubled</i> in twenty years --a rate of growth attained by no other industrial country [9].
<br><br>
In fact, the principal dangers of population growth may not be that it will lead to poverty, but to excessive wealth; not to famine, but to many people dying of over-eating.
<br><br>
<br><br>
<b>NOTES:</b>
<br><br>
1. Proceedings of the United Nations scientific conference on the conservation and utilization of resources, 1949, 2, p. 7. Details of the calculations are given on p. 16 of my book <i>The myth of overpopulation</i>, Melbourne: Advocate Press, 1973.
<br><br>
2. See FAO Monthly Bulletin of Agricultural and Economic Statistics, January, 1972.
<br><br>
3. For further information see <i>The economics of subsistence agriculture</i> by M. R. Haswell and the present author (Macmillan, 4th edition), p. 7.
<br><br>
4. See particularly Dr Gapalan, Director of the Indian Nutrition Laboratory, <i>American Journal of Clinical Nutrition</i>, January 1970; Dr Sukhatme, until recently Director of Statistics for FAO, Indian Journal of Medical Research, November 1969; and my own article "Calories and Protein in Indonesia", <i>Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies</i>, 1972, which quotes a number of further statements by biochemists.
<br><br>
5. My own calculations unpublished.
<br><br>
6. <i>Population</i> (Paris), September, 1970.
<br><br>
7. For further information see my <i>Population growth and land use</i> (Macmillan, 1967) pages 178-182.
<br><br>
8. Reference to Sir Edward Kerry: 'Even at six years of age the services of children become valuable, and with many of the lower classes of settlers this might operate against their wish to send them to school'. Evidence before the select committee on transportation to Australia, House of Commons, July, 1837.
<br><br>
9. Reference to industrial labour force in Japan, <i>International Year Book of Labour Statistics</i>.
<br><br><br><br>
<i>This chapter is reprinted (with some added references given at the end of the chapter) from an article in "Current Affairs Bulletin" 1973, 49, pp. 314-317.</i>
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-52673350127439886982007-08-27T23:18:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:19:06.865+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 3 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
<b><font size="5"> Is There a Minerals and Energy Crisis? </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John Ray
<br><br>
IT SEEMS EMINENTLY commonsense to say that if we are steadily using up our minerals and fossil fuels we must eventually run out, and the sooner we start preparing against that eventuality the better. The fact that we are steadily discovering more deposits of minerals may help postpone but not cancel the day we run out.
<br><br>
An extremely relevant consideration to us, however, is just when that day is due. As far as energy is concerned, the projection must be to millions of years in the future. Match that against the mere six thousand years of our recorded history. True, our fossil fuels will not last that long. Oil may run out within the lifetime of most people now living. Coal may last no more than a thousand years. But nuclear energy and solar power are practically limitless. Already Britain gets twenty per cent of its power from nuclear energy and if it can get that, there is no reason (other than suffering a slightly higher cost) why it cannot get the total. This cannot be an immediate or very short-time transformation. It takes years to build nuclear power stations and a sudden cut-off of Arab oil or some other such man-made limitation will cause temporary disruption, but there are no serious long-term problems.
<br><br>
'But even uranium will run out eventually!' True. But we really have no idea when. Uranium has only recently become an economically useful mineral so exploration has hardly begun. Even so, the already-known reserves will at least last us through the next century. This is particularly so when we realize that there are already in commission in Russia and at Dounreay in Scotland 'fast breeder' nuclear reactors which enable all of the uranium mined to be used, instead of just a small part of it.
<br><br>
Even uranium, however, is merely a transitional fuel. The fuel of the future is sea water -- or the hydrogen which is one of its components. Hydrogen will be used in the future as both a chemical and as a nuclear fuel. As a nuclear fuel it (or its isotope, deuterium) will be used in a fusion reaction, with helium as an end-product. Just as the H-bomb produces far more energy than does an A-bomb, a fusion reaction with hydrogen produces far more energy than a fission reaction with uranium. And the beauty of it is that so little hydrogen is required to do this. Therefore the amount of seawater we have should last us practically forever.
<br><br>
There are great engineering problems in setting up a controlled fusion reaction. So much energy (heat) is produced that the process cannot be contained in a solid container. It must be contained in energy (magnetic) fields. Engineering in energy is naturally a much less developed art than engineering in metals. Even so, the task has already been accomplished. Net energy production by thermonuclear (fusion) means has been carried out, although only for extremely short periods. Seeing that nobody had even heard of nuclear power only thirty years ago, this is very rapid progress indeed. The technical problems will certainly have been overcome long before we need to rely on this source of power some centuries hence.
<br><br>
'But thermonuclear power is certainly not going to be very portable. What is going to fuel the cars and trucks of the future?' The answer to this also involves hydrogen from seawater, only in this case as a recyclable chemical fuel rather than as a consumable nuclear fuel. Once you have a source of power -- be it coal, oil, nuclear or thermonuclear -- you have various options open to you for storing it or converting it to portable form. The electric battery you have in your car is perhaps the most familiar example of this. Another option is to use your power source to break down water into its chemical components, oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be stored and used as a chemical fuel in much the same way as we now use petrol. Unlike petrol, however, hydrogen is completely non-polluting and completely recyclable. For this reason, it may come to be used even before petrol runs out. The reason it is non-polluting and recyclable is that when it is burnt it simply recombines with atmospheric oxygen to become water again. As long as you have a source of power, it is the everlasting fuel. Every gutter becomes part of a re-cycling system. Our bodies are as well adapted to dealing with water suspended in the atmosphere as they are not adapted to dealing with the sulphur dioxide that petrol at present puts there. The only reason that hydrogen is not at present used is cost and the fact that it requires a pressure vessel to store it rather than the simple sheet steel tank that presently suffices for petrol. Insofar as it is a worse polluter, then, we must welcome the fact that petroleum is running out.
<br><br>
'But what about nuclear waste-products? Surely they are the worst polluters of all!' This is so. But even that is a transitional problem and their production and disposal is at least far, far more carefully supervised than is the production and disposal of other waste-products. It is a transitional problem because radio-active by-products are an inevitable outcome of nuclear fission only. Thermonuclear fusion in theory need produce no radioactive by-products. Contamination due to accident could occur but the single end product of the hydrogen-based fusion reaction itself (helium) is atomically stable. Thus when thermonuclear power comes in, the age of no-pollution will truly have dawned. Hydrogen is the ecologist's dream fuel. If the Arab oil embargoes hasten our conversion to hydrogen, this could well be enough to qualify the Arabs for canonisation into the ecologists' pantheon.
<br><br>
Another potentially limitless source of power is the sun itself. It has been calculated that five times as much solar energy falls on the roof of the average American house as is used in the form of electrical energy within that house. Except for considerations of cost, we could probably switch to this source of pollution-free power right now. Australia's empty deserts could become a great economic resource -- collecting solar energy every day of the year, converting it to electric power and using that power to produce hydrogen from seawater.
<br><br>
So the 'energy' part of the `minerals and energy crisis' is shown to be in fact no great problem at all. Energy may become substantially more expensive in the near future, but in the long term even this will scarcely be detectable in its influence on the steady upward rise of our living standards. We may have many short-term crises of man's deliberate creation (such as the Arab oil embargo), but all the energy we could ever want is there for us to use if that is what we really want to do. Any limitations are imposed by man, not by nature. Only the unforeseen is dangerous and that by its very nature we cannot plan for. All we can do is make sure that we have many alternate sources for the power we use and this is something that is going on apace. In the future, it is unlikely that the world will ever again let itself become as dependent on one source of fuel as it once did on Arab oil. When thermonuclear power comes in, sources of power will be as common as seawater. Any country with water will be self-sufficient in fuel.
<br><br>
To sum up, then, even without oil, our existing resources of coal and uranium are sufficient to provide us with energy for centuries to come, and long before that time runs out solar and thermonuclear power will have become commercially practicable. As an added bonus, reserves of coal and uranium tend to be located in politically stable countries, such as the U.S.A., Australia, Great Britain and Europe.
<br><br>
The situation with minerals is not remarkably different. Again we have a scenario of possible substitutions stretching into the indefinite future. Additionally, as the costs of particular minerals rise, so it will become more attractive to re-cycle them. One very versatile metal that has come into increasing use in the present century is aluminium. It presently finds a wide variety of uses including structural applications. In alloys such as 'duralumin' its one major disadvantage -- softness -- can also be overcome. In previous centuries it was used very little. Only when a method of extracting it cheaply from bauxite was invented did it become a resource. Now a method of extracting it from that most ubiquitous of materials-clay, has been perfected and a trial plant is already in operation. As it is the most plentiful metal in the earth's crust, this advance is an important one. One of the reasons aluminium is not more used is that it requires a great deal of electricity in its production. With the future advent of thermonuclear power, however, this should be no problem and the price of aluminium should drop greatly relative to other metals. When this happens, the effect will be to reserve our less abundant metals for applications where their peculiar properties are indispensable and aluminium will become the work-horse metal that iron is today. Since the day when we will run out of clay seems extraordinarily far off, there would appear to be no long term worries about the supply of aluminium. The metal of the future is underneath our feet.
<br><br>
No doubt, however, some clays will be better for producing aluminium than others. This is the point: the physical materials of the earth are available practically without limit: sand, clay, rock etc. Given the availability of power, the only decision we have to make is which ones to use. The technological possibilities are so wide that what we use is what is cheapest. We could still use other things if we have to. Take sand, for instance. Sand (silica) is the raw material for glass and with the invention of glass wool and fibreglass, the ways in which glass could be put to use are far greater than is at present economically attractive. Fifty years ago, for instance, who would have thought that suburban Australian fishermen would be putting to sea on weekends in boats made of glass? And yet it is nowadays something so common as to pass almost unnoticed. For all practical purposes, the availability of the materials of this planet for structural and other purposes can be treated as infinite. The only question ever is which ones we use.
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-2484121498590190512007-07-27T23:17:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:17:53.853+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 4 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br><br>
<b><font size="5"> The Doomsters Rise Again </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By PETER SAMUEL
<br><br>
'Australia with its minerals is like the bride with the very large dowry. She can wait to be wooed.'
<br><br>
With this little simile Rex Connor, Minister for Minerals and Energy, sums up his policy philosophies. He has never used his analogy in any public medium, only in private conversation. Perhaps his reticence is due to the rather archaic social context of the analogy. Possibly he is biding his time so that departmental work on a major energy policy statement can be finalised, submitted to the cabinet and endorsed as the guidelines within which Australia's minerals will be developed under Labor.
<br><br>
But the allusion to an Australia possessing very rich resources in a world where they will become inexorably scarcer and more intensely needed, is the key to the minister's approach to policy development.
<br><br>
Connor has said he believes there is a developing 'energy crisis' in the world and in the U.S.A., western Europe and Japan in particular. Australia's general strategy should be to quietly take stock of its energy resources and only export them in such quantities and at such a time as his department's planning suggests will maximise the benefits for the nation.
<br><br>
The minister envisages a new regime of government planned and controlled development of Australian energy reserves, based on a judicious exploitation of the 'world energy crisis' and the addition of 'resources diplomacy' to the traditional tools of foreign policy.
<br><br>
The idea of a long-range plan for Australian energy resources is not new and not particularly a Labor Party idea. Commonwealth government officials under the previous regime started work some time ago on the plan which Connor intends to unveil later in the year.
<br><br>
Lloyd Bott, head of the Department of National Development which ran minerals policies in the Liberal era, said in an address last year: 'We will need to decide just what our future fuel needs are likely to be ... my department is in the process of undertaking a major study of energy demands to the end of the century, and I expect that this study should be completed by the middle of the year (1973 presumably). Australia's total energy resources must be balanced against our forecast needs . . .'
<br><br>
That project has been taken over by the new team-Connor, his new tough-minded departmental head of Gorton-era fame, Sir Lenox Hewitt, and the small band of all-purpose under-officers he trails around with him in his jumps from department to department. Asking a government official to estimate mineral reserves is rather like asking a police chief to estimate undetected crime. He has a vested interest in under-estimation, and since no one can possibly know the answers anyway he can throw his figures around confident that no one will be able to prove him wrong. At least, in the case of the minerals crystal ball gazer, his errors will not be provable until he is personally long forgotten.
<br><br>
In 1938, the chief geological adviser to the Commonwealth government, Dr Woolnough, declared Australia's reserves so poor that it would 'in little more than a generation become an importer of iron ore.' By the mid-1960s Australia should have run out of iron ore, and so it was considered imperative in 1938 that there should be a prudent husbanding of the nation's scarce resources. The Lyons government intervened and placed an embargo on iron ore exports, which lasted until the balance-of-payments crisis in 1960 forced its abandonment. It was the Liberals who placed a ban on the export of natural gas and oil and who severely restricted export permits for uranium.
<br><br>
Government restriction on minerals and energy has a long and bi-partisan tradition in Australia, and Connor is merely treading in familiar political footsteps. But he seems to intend to go further along the same track. It is probably good politics. It looks like conserving our resources against covetous, money-making foreigners. But is it good sense? Is there really an 'energy crisis' which requires such action?
<br><br>
Most of the people in America who are talking about an energy crisis there are talking about the next ten to fifteen years. Beyond 1985 or 1990, most people agree there will be new sources of technology available to provide for energy needs-fast-breeding nuclear reactors that need almost no fuel, solar energy, geothermal and tidal power, possibly fusion reactors and fuel cells.
<br><br>
True, some particularly pessimistic scientists calling themselves the Club of Rome played around with potential growth rates of demand and a potential tailing away of technological advance and produced predictions of disaster in a widely publicised book called <i>The Limits to Growth</i>. This work, described by the distinguished British economist Wilfred Beckerman as 'such a brazen, impudent piece of nonsense that nobody could possibly take it seriously', was taken seriously by the World Bank which has produced a painfully long but very thorough demolition of this classic in doom-mongering. Indeed, apologists for the Club of Rome have been reduced since to saying: 'At least they promoted lively discussion.'
<br><br>
Most serious forecasters think that population growth and demand for material resources will decline after 1985 and that radically new technologies will be available to serve energy needs. In any event the problems of the world fifteen years and more ahead are so highly speculative that little purpose seems to be served by predictions.
<br><br>
It follows from this alone that any Australian policy based on the assumption of the world energy shortages lasting into the 1990s and beyond is likely to be ill based. Uranium is not likely to remain in strong demand because of breeder reactors and even oil and gas (not to speak of crude old coal) are likely to be regarded as obsolete and inefficient energy sources.
<br><br>
Over the long span of economic development real energy costs have gone down as technology has advanced rapidly to improve world energy productivity, although there have been periodic episodes when a trend to scarcity appeared for a short while, during which people of very pessimistic nature have each time predicted an eventual 'run out' of reserves.
<br><br>
There have been two surprising counter-attacks against the conservationist policy of the minerals planners in the Federal Government. One came from the Treasury and the other from the Bureau of Mineral Resources.
<br><br>
The Treasury, in a publication 'Economic growth, is it worth having?' has published a major criticism of the idea of an imminent energy crisis and made a powerful attack on export restraint. Connor's idea that Australia might hold back certain minerals for sale in the future is argued against in these terms by the Treasury: 'Possible future gains are being weighed against certain current losses: those in whose interests it is suggested that a certain mineral should be conserved might not turn out to want it at all, or might want it only at a fraction of its current real price. The idea of measuring the scarcity of minerals by extrapolating demand from currently proven reserves is described as "a fallacy of the crudest kind".'
<br><br>
Supporting the Treasury is Mr L. C. Noakes, assistant director of the Bureau of Mineral Resources. The bureau, although an agency which operates within the Connor empire, has a degree of independence.
<br><br>
Noakes in the latest issue of the departmental journal, <i>Australian Mineral Industry Quarterly Review</i>, says: 'It will never be possible to predict confidently either availability of or demand for minerals for years ahead because ore yet to be found cannot be estimated with any confidence, and demand although more amenable to estimation is likely to be controlled by complex factors such as per capita income, population, relative price, substitution and technology . . .' He, too, describes predictions that certain minerals, will 'run out' as 'oversimplistic'.
<br><br>
In relation to coal, Noakes reviews the world and the Australian situation and concludes: 'There is little sense in conserving Australian coal.' Proven reserves are equivalent to 260 years' supply at current production rates, and there would be very many times that if there was any need to go out and prove more. In any case the world coal situation is one of sheer plethora. Already identified reserves of coal amount to about ten trillion tons or many centuries' supplies.
<br><br>
Australia's best strategy for coal is to sell as much as we can as quickly as we can before the Japanese get around to exploiting the vast coal reserves closer at hand in China and Russian Siberia. In the longer term, looking to the 1980s, the market for all kinds of coal seems likely to be steadily undercut by improved methods of electricity generation and steelmaking technology.
<br><br>
Similarly, there isn't any case for keeping our uranium in the ground, because conservationist policies merely encourage other countries to find their own supplies and accelerate progress toward fast breeder reactors and other technology which devalues our reserves.
<br><br>
The petroleum situation is somewhat different. Again there is no question of the world suddenly 'running out' as the dramatists and catastrophists would have us believe. Vast reserves of oil are being proved offshore on continental shelves. Petroleum-poor Britain has suddenly become rich, thanks to oil found under the North Sea, and there is no reason why this discovery should not be repeated in many other places if the necessary drilling is encouraged. Existing wells can be exploited more intensely. But costs are going up and the geological experts agree that demand is pressing more heavily on oil supplies than on supplies of other fossil fuels."
<br><br>
Proven reserves of oil under Australian control are only about 300 million tons or something over ten years' supply at current rates of use. But the prospects for finding more oil are generally agreed among the experts to be good. An oil and' gas specialist of the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Mr M. Konecki, in a paper presented to an Institute of Fuel conference in Canberra last year presented figures suggesting that there could be something like sixteen billion tons of oil on Australia's continental shelf, or 500 years' supply at the current rate of use.
<br><br>
The problem is to find the stuff. The trouble with conservationist measures is that they deter oil search. If the government will not allow you to sell the good oil on the world market, why bother looking for it? The greater the conservationist tendency of the government the more risk there will be for oil searchers that they will not get rewards for even successful drilling efforts. The conservationist policies toward iron ore deterred the proving of reserves for decades and deprived Australia of tens of millions of dollars of export income in the late 1950s, when the economy very badly needed it. The Japanese bought their ores from the Philippines and India when they would have been buying them in Australia but for the local conservationists.
<br><br>
Former PM John Gorton introduced restrictive conservationist principles into Australian oil production, with his enforcement of an arbitrary price freeze and export ban on Australian oil.
<br><br>
It is just this kind of suppression of the price mechanism which has led to the so-called energy crisis in the United States. Connor appears to want to follow the same path with his promise of nation-wide uniformity of natural gas prices. This is the introduction of vague social welfare concepts at the cost of severe distortion of economic resource allocation and a general increase in cost levels.
<br><br>
Connor is also continuing the ban on exports of natural gas, despite evidence that Australia has supplies beyond any conceivable needs. At least, he says he is continuing the ban 'until our reserves are established'. The trouble with this approach is that reserves can never be finally established. In any case Connor's own advisers say that there is a plethora of natural gas. Oil and gas specialist Konecki says: 'Not only will Australia's needs be satisfied, but also considerable volumes of gas will be available for export.'
<br><br>
But government policy towards gas is unlikely to be based on careful, rational analysis. The most striking evidence for this pessimistic prediction is Connor's commitment to a vastly expensive national pipeline grid ahead of any benefit-cost study whatever. Connor has already spelt out how the pipeline at millions of dollars a mile will be extended to Brisbane and Melbourne from central Australia and backwards to the Pilbara, Kalgoorlie and Perth. He is prepared to commit Australia to the most expensive civil engineering project in its history without any expert analysis of the returns which might be expected.
<br><br>
Melbourne stockbrokers, Williams, Tolhurst and Co. who specialise in mineral affairs, say in a recent report that the project 'could be the greatest white elephant this country has seen'.
<br><br>
'Resources diplomacy' is a bright new phrase which is being played with like a toy by government ministers. No one will spell out what they mean by it, but it seems there is a vague idea that Australia may be able to exploit its minerals riches to extract special concessions --of economic and other kinds-- from minerals importers. It seems unlikely that this will be possible, even if it were desirable. Even though Australia is relatively rich in many minerals, it has nothing like a monopoly of any item and prices will be determined by the world market. The withholding of supplies because the government does not like the price offered will merely mean reduced sales by Australia and the diversion of customers elsewhere.
<br><br>
Resource surplus does not give Australia any particular bargaining power as implied by the concept of 'resource diplomacy'. Australia could never threaten to withhold supplies of minerals and expect to make gains. Certainly Japan, for example, is heavily dependent on Australia for supplies of iron ore and coal and could become heavily dependent on Australian liquefied natural gas. But Australia has become just about equally dependent on Japan as a market. We would have just as much as they to lose by disruption of minerals sales, so what diplomatic power do the resources provide? The answer has to be: very little indeed.
<br><br>
The sheiks of the Middle East are at least bargaining for realistic prices for their superb oil reserves. But they are just about as dependent on the oil importers as the importers are on them, and the idea of the U.S.A. being 'held to ransom' or more wittily 'put over a barrel' by the Arabs is rather unreal. The sheiks have had the opportunity to exercise 'resources diplomacy' for a couple of decades, and it has not amounted to much. The U.S.A., for example, continues to sell armaments to their obsessive hate-object, Israel. If 'resources diplomacy' cannot stop that, what can it stop?
<br><br>
Australia is not heading towards any genuine energy crisis but could be facing crises of government policy and regulation, due to woolly thinking and prejudice.
<br><br>
An energy crisis will come if the proposed government minerals authority, staffed by rule-bound public servants and financed in competition with welfare funds, is unable to perform up to the standard of the free-wheeling entrepreneurs with their risk capital, who have traditionally produced the mineral and energy goods.
<br><br>
<br><br>
<i>This chapter originally appeared as an article in "The Bulletin", 14 July 1973, pp. 23-25.</i>
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-85430845325603470452007-06-27T23:16:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:16:39.243+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 5 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
<b><font size="4"> IN DEFENCE OF FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTS </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By John Ray
<br><br>
Amid all the recurrent hysteria about French nuclear tests some very pertinent considerations appear conveniently to have been forgotten. The first is that the French do have a very good reason for continuing to want these tests. To many plastic radicals the very idea of a French nuclear deterrent seems hilarious. What purpose could a French bomb serve in comparison with the overwhelming might of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.? How many times over do we need to be able to destroy ourselves?
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Viewed through French (or even European) eyes, however, the question is altogether different. It centres on the reliability of the U.S.A. It didn't come to the help of Europe for several years during the two world wars. Why should Europeans believe that it will do differently in the next one? In the next one, however, even half an hour might be too long to wait. In a limited Russian attack Europe certainly could rapidly be subjugated using nuclear weapons and America might be very tempted not to 'escalate' the war by unleashing its missiles on Russia. Isolationist America is a weak reed indeed for Europe to lean on. In these circumstances Europe must have a deterrent of its own. It is like a crab without a shell until it does.
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But how credible is the French deterrent? It doesn't really need to be very credible. Just the chance of one H-bomb exploded over Moscow would surely be enough to restrain any Russian military adventurousness. Missiles are still hard to intercept and only one of the French missiles has to get through to make the gain not worth the cost.
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Realising all this then, we can see that France is being far from unreasonable. Indeed what can we expect any member of such a traditionally proud race as the French to think of a deliberate attempt by others to prevent him from having the protection that other nations have already acquired for themselves? This is a point that should be stressed: the U.S.A. and Britain are deliberately trying to exclude France from the nuclear club. If the U.S.A. were willing to share with France the nuclear secrets it already shares with Britain, there would be no need for the French tests. Protests about the Pacific tests should be made as vigorously at the American embassy as the French.
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Indeed, pressure on the Americans does seem the most reasonable strategy for those who oppose further tests. France is by now so well and truly in the nuclear club that continued American refusal to share its secrets makes no sense at all. 'Proliferation' has already occurred. It is too late to prevent it. There is even a precedent (Britain) for such sharing once a country has attained independent nuclear capability.
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Another thing we need to look at, however, is just how dangerous the French tests are. It should be remembered that they are estimated to increase radiation levels here by only one hundredth of the background radiation level. We all are exposed to radiation from natural sources for every day of our lives. In comparison, the French tests are neither here nor there. If someone is really, worried about radiation causing his wife to have a miscarriage (with a radiation-damaged ovum or zygote your wife probably wouldn't even know she had a miscarriage anyhow. It would just be part of a normal period) he would do more good by ceasing to wear a luminous wristwatch than by protesting about French tests.
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The tales we hear about the damage tests will do to the unborn are in fact one of the less creditable forms of scientific generalisation. They are based on extrapolations that assume that if X amount of radiation causes so much damage then one thousandth of that radiation causes one thousandth of the damage. This ignores the possibility (often asserted) that radiation may have to reach a critical level in order to do any damage at all. If normal scientific caution reigned in place of ideology we would have to say that there is simply no evidence that radiation levels as low as those created by the French tests will do any damage.
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-31526356843670166042007-05-27T23:14:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:15:25.783+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 6 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
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<b><font size="5"> Decentralisation: or the myth that it is good to get people to live where they don't want to
</font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John Ray
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OF ALL THE political lobbies, the decentralisation lobby is perhaps the most confused. Of all the trend-setting causes that represent a desire to have your cake and eat it too, decentralisation could well be the major. How can one have the benefits of the big city without having a big city? That is the question that decentralisation proponents have to answer.
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Historically, the great advocates of decentralisation in Australia were the military men and the farmers. The farmers wanted decentralisation for the quite obvious reason that it would bring at least some of the benefits of the city closer to them. They could enjoy farm life while their wives enjoyed the variety of the city supermarkets and shopping centres and their children enjoyed the social opportunities of the city. For them it certainly was a fantasied way of having their cake and eating it too. Of course they were seldom so brash as to advance publicly such considerations as the reason for decentralisation. They would normally in fact appeal to the strategic considerations of the military men.
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The strategic advantages expected of decentralisation were fairly obvious for a conventional war. An empty countryside can be advanced through by an invader much more easily than one infested with farmers-turned-guerilla. Having your population scattered also meant that a sudden onslaught on one place (such as any of the great seaboard metropolises) would not immobilise the defenders nearly as much. The loss of one city would not be nearly so tragic and the forces required for occupation of the country would be all that much larger.
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Such considerations, however, do seem to have become rather outdated by the nature and probabilities of modern warfare. Australia's defence forces are so weak that any enemy who got as far as landing here would have a practically uninterrupted conquest. Australia being so vast and yet so little populated is practically indefensible by conventional military means. Australia's entire defence effort has been directed towards winning reliable friends in the region and in preventing any invader ever reaching these shores. The armed forces that are maintained have no realistic purpose other than assisting in brushfire wars in neighbouring friendly countries. For all intents and purposes the only significant military defence Australia has is the American Seventh fleet and the U.S. Air Force.
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I have no wish to be understood as saying that I consider the level of military preparedness described above as adequate. What I would point out, however, is that there are many more urgent military steps to be taken before any investment in decentralisation for strategic purposes becomes worthwhile. If we were serious about defending the place, we would be better off training some more soldiers. It is no good making one's country defensible if we are not also going to provide it with some defenders. Contrast Australia's army of 34,000 with Taiwan's army of 600,000. The two countries have similar populations. Obviously, in the face of any real threat, neither decentralisation nor anything else will save Australia. An army division in Darwin, however, would be a more realistic defence move than subsidies to rural New South Wales or Victorian farming towns.
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Recently, however, new forces have been added to the ranks of the decentralisation advocates. Instead of conservative farmers, we now have radical ecology cranks. An unholy alliance has been forged.
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The ecology people see decentralisation as attractive in that it offers relief from what is generically called "urban blight" -- things such as traffic congestion, crime, polluted air and water, overcrowded recreational facilities etc. There are also certain economic attractions in smaller centres -- principally cheaper land.
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No one can dispute that smaller cities and towns are superior to large cities in the respects listed. Does it follow however that we should encourage people to live in smaller cities? I think not. Australia has a great range of urban centres. You can live in a small town such as Innisfail (pop. 7,000 ), a small city such as Cairns (pop. 27,000 ), a larger city such as Townsville (pop. 69,000 ), a small metropolis such as Hobart (pop. 150,000 ), a large city such as Newcastle (pop. 340,000 ) , a metropolis such as Adelaide (pop. 820,000) or a very large metropolis such as Sydney (pop. 2,780,000 ).
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In the above circumstances, with this range of size, if anyone is really honest about preferring smaller centres to the larger ones, why don't they go there? The smaller towns and the country generally need people. Country people are always bemoaning the drift to the cities. What is holding our trendies back from reversing the drift?
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A great deal! While it may be true that the big cities have disadvantages, what is overlooked is that they do have positive attractions as well. Why is it that many country towns cannot get a resident doctor? Why is it that the Education Department has to resort to coercion to get teachers to go to country schools? Why is it that academics are so reluctant to apply for jobs at country institutes of technology that even a bachelor's degree will get you a lectureship there instead of the doctorate that would be required in the city? Why is it that the Australian public service has to offer accelerated promotion to get its officers to go and work in our beautiful decentralised national capital? Because small towns are <i>dead</i>. They lack the social variety and range of recreational opportunities of the big city. The jobs are there and the pay is in many cases better, but still people prefer the big city. And what basically is it that gives the big city its attraction? People! (see Part 1, Chapter 1, page 3 also.) To have social variety means to have more people. To support a variety of recreational and educational facilities there needs must be more people. To have a greater variety of jobs on offer means there must be more people to fill them all. To have a variety of restaurants available means there must be more people to eat in them. To find sufficient people to support minority interest groups means that there must be enough people for the minority still to amount to significant numbers in absolute terms. Most of our rewards ultimately or primarily come from people and people in abundance are what the big city offers. Urban growth is no accident. It is, in at least a large part, the result of people voting with their feet. If the balance of costs and gains was against the big city, the trend would be away from the cities. It is in fact the opposite. More people are moving to the cities than away from them.
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Of course, in their foggy way, the trendies do know that big cities have advantages too. <i>They</i> are not moving out, after all. What they believe is that government action can still give the small centres comparable attractions to the larger ones. It is all a matter of subsidies! So simple! What they have to tell us is how subsidies can replace people. What they also overlook is that cities have immense economic advantages -- principally the advantage of minimizing transport costs. 'Transport costs'! some will say. 'How dull. Surely transport is only a minor and highly secondary economic factor!'
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Far from it. Depending on what you include, up to half of our GNP goes on transport-related costs. Up to half the work done in the community goes into transport-related activities. Think of the motor vehicle industry, the oil industry, the railways, the airlines, the buses, trams and taxis. Think of our largest single employer, the Post Office. Think of transport substitutes such as the telephone service. Think of shipping firms, sailors, wharf labourers, ship builders, road builders, truck drivers, hauliers and delivery men. Go for a drive on city roads during the day and try to get some faint inkling of how many commercial vehicles there must be in use. Think of the mechanics and the petrol stations on every second corner. Think of the number of people who spend precious hours driving themselves to and from work every day. It may seem absurd, but one of the most characteristic and most frequent of human activities is motion -- transport of ourselves and of objects from place to place.
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We all have some conception of the immense number of intermediary steps that have to be gone through before something such as a television set can be produced. Not one of us would be able to, unassisted, make a single component. Think, that for every step in that set's production the components have to be transported from one workman to another -- often to workmen in separate factories. If those factories were far apart imagine the huge extra costs that would be incurred. Concentration of factories, workers and customers in one large city minimizes these costs. Without large cities we would all be so much poorer and so much more lacking the luxuries that we regard as part of the good life. Whatever it is that people want to pay for, they would be able to afford less if it were not for big cities.
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Therefore, industrial firms could seldom justify setting up outside major urban centres. Their transport costs would be too greatly increased. The land they build their factory on will be cheaper, but most of the materials they use to build it will be dearer. Hence they will have increased costs getting supplies for their factory and increased costs in distributing the finished product. There normally have to be great natural advantages for an industrial activity to be set up outside the major urban centres.
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Big cities have, then, both social and economic advantages. On the social side they offer variety and on the economic side they offer economy of transport. They are one of man's oldest, most versatile and most successful inventions.
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When, therefore, governments intervene in the natural settlement process in the name of decentralisation, what they find they have to do is to offer inducements both to the industrialist and to the people who will work for him. These "inducements" are usually of a monetary form -- such as the infamous 60:30:10 rule whereby the New South Wales government pays with the taxpayers' money ninety per cent of the establishment costs of factories built in rural centres. Nominally, of course, the money is lent -- but at such low interest rates and for such long terms as to be (particularly given the rate of inflation) essentially an outright gift. A poorly conceived enterprise that would never get backing elsewhere can always get government backing if it promises to set up in the country. If it has enough taxpayers' money spent on it (including subsidies and outright grants as well as loans) any enterprise will flourish.
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To get people to move into the country the inducements are similar. Generally they are not so unsubtle as to pay obviously higher salaries -- though "loadings" of various sorts do from time to time appear. The qualifications needed for a job are watered down. This means that you get a higher classification than normally and with it goes of course a higher salary. Yet because of this little subterfuge, it can still be claimed that officers in the country and officers in the city are being paid equally for equal work. Canberra postings for Commonwealth Public Servants are the best known instance of this potent, but hard-to-prove practice.
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What it all amounts to is that people who would not normally want to go to the country are being tempted to give up the attractions of the city by monetary bribery. People who do not want to go to the country are being forced to do so by their own monetary need. And for whose good? The people who go are not as happy as they would be in Sydney or Melbourne on a similar salary (though some do eventually learn to like their new environment) nor is the taxpayer as happy as he would be in spending the tax dollars that it costs on himself.
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It would make better sense (though nothing in this connection seems to make good sense) to give the unwilling emigrants from the city the extra money anyhow and let them go on living in the city where they want to live: Then at least some people would feel greatly benefited by the outpouring of taxpayers' dollars.
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At this point the whole exercise seems to look a little like the outcome of some moral conviction that decentralisation or country living is merely, in some mystical sense, "good", or to be admired. What makes it "good" no one seems to know. Perhaps it is something like "kindness" -- we just <i>know</i> it to be good. Being what people want to do is not cause enough to make it good -- for the excellent reason that it is <i>not</i> what they want to do. It being essential for our defence cannot be what makes it good because, in fact, if anything, it diverts money that otherwise might go to really necessary and effective defence spending -- such as training more soldiers. Its being necessary because only country life builds up the character and fortitude that a nation needs cannot be the reason or someone will have to explain where the city-bred people of London found the splendid fortitude and character they displayed in the Battle of Britain. Generations of city life with hardly a breath of country air does not seem to have turned them into moral marshmallows.
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No, the only possible justification for decentralisation can be that it springs from a fascistic conviction that something is just good for people for some abstract or aesthetic reason and even if people cannot see it for themselves they should still be forced or induced to comply with its requirements. The Nazis thought that blue eyes and fair hair were a good thing for reasons that could never adequately be demonstrated (but which were probably mainly aesthetic) so they determined to fasten such a mould on the whole of humanity. Decentralisation mania seems to be a democratic and fortunately weaker strain of the same virus.
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In summary, on the evidence of people's own choices, the balance of costs and gains is in favour of the big city. For people who sincerely disagree with this evident majority judgment, there is already a great variety of smaller centres they can go to.
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'But Sydney is the only place I could get a job as good as the one I have now', someone will say. 'I would love to live in the country if only suitable work were provided'. Given the difficulty that employers have in getting people to take the lush jobs of Canberra, anybody who makes such a claim is probably in fact making a false claim. The big city is not the only home of good jobs. It may however be the only home of many specialised jobs and if for you the only good job is one of these then it may be true that you are forever condemned to city life. If, for instance you are a merchant banker you will under no government have congenial job prospects in Coffs Harbour. And the reason is an inevitable one -- because personal contact with the heads of large corporations and financial institutions is so important to your work or the work of your firm. Scattering the financial institutions and big corporations throughout the countryside would be scant help. It would simply render your work less effective, reduce the call on your services and cost you a lot more in trunk-line telephone charges.
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The very essence of many specialised jobs is that they are made possible only by having within reach a large population to support them. If only 0.001 per cent of the population on average want your services, it is going to take a very large agglomeration of people to make your service into a full-time job. If you have chosen such a job while also having a liking for 'wide open spaces' then you are certainly in need of help -- but perhaps help of a psychiatric rather than of a monetary kind.
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It is nonetheless surprising how few jobs, even ones which are apparently specialised, are limited to the big city. Even computer programmers, systems analysts and university lecturers can, if they try, get jobs in centres as small as Townsville (pop. 69,000). 'But who would want to live in Townsville?' To that there is only one answer possible -- the trite-sounding but ineluctable answer that one must give to all decentralisation advocates: 'You cannot have your cake and eat it too.'
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-22095687168716135402007-04-27T23:13:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:13:55.949+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 7 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
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<b><font size="5"> Can We Afford Decentralisation? </font></b>
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By PETER SAMUEL
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That big cities are bad, has been received wisdom for many Australians since the beginning of this century, when they showed their first shock symptoms after realising that they were the most urbanised nation in the world. Lately there has been added to it the new whizz idea that big cities are uneconomic. Mr Whitlam, more likely than anyone else who matters in Federal politics to hop on to whizz ideas, has had a ride or two on this one lately. Now there is sad news for both a conventional wisdom and a newly fashionable idea: big cities may be the most economic way of housing Australians. This news comes from a confidential Government document.
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Why this particular document is confidential may be due partly to Australia's unique (among democracies) insistence on keeping practically everything secret. (See: 'Why can't we know what the public servants are doing,' <i>The Bulletin</i>, 6 March 1971.) But it may also come from the vested interests of the governing coalition parties in keeping their rural seats. Now that so many farmers are going broke it can seem to be good politics to theorise away about how there must be decentralisation of new industry away from the big metropolitan areas.
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Not that anyone does anything about this question. There is plenty of blah, but Government machinery stays still. It is five years since a Commonwealth and State Decentralisation Committee was established. The Committee commissioned a series of studies on the costs and benefits of decentralisation. Now the findings of these studies remain secret. Mr Whitlam has asked for them to be made public but he has been refused. One reason why they remain secret may be that they deny politicians' blah.
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<i>The Bulletin</i> has obtained a copy of one of the key reports. Under the forbidding title of 'A study of the comparative costs of providing public utilities and services in Melbourne and select Victorian centres,' prepared by Dr J. Paterson of the consulting firm Urban Systems Analysis, Melbourne, and circulated to Commonwealth and State Departments but otherwise kept secret, the report suggests that decentralisation may be uneconomic.
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The sixty-page document fails to find any significant diseconomies in Melbourne's growth compared with eight smaller cities. Indeed, it finds that the cost of maintaining services in the smaller centres 'was at least fifty per cent higher on average than the cost of services in Melbourne.'
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The main conclusion of the study is that the size of urban centres is probably relatively unimportant in urban costs --that in determining costs, geographical location, resources, management and planning are all much more important than size.
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The Paterson Report is rather tentative in some of its conclusions because it is unable to allow for differences in the quality or range of services, so that it really measures expenditures rather than real costs. For this reason it is just possible that the results of the study would favour the big city against the small centres rather more strikingly if it had been possible to adjust for different levels of service.
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<blockquote>Here are some of the report's main findings:
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* In education and hospitals, at least, Melbourne's standards look higher than those of the small Victorian cities, and only in the case of roads, where the metropolitan centre suffers severe traffic congestion, does the big city provide clearly inferior levels of service to its citizens.
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* Expenditure on police services in Melbourne and also in the larger Victorian provincial towns is lower than in the towns under 20,000-about $5.50 per person per year against an average $7.50. There was no significant difference in education spending as between the larger and smaller centres, despite the better facilities available in the larger centres-which suggests strongly that real education costs are less in the big city. Much the same appeared true for hospitals.
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* Unit expenditure on running water supply and sewage services in Melbourne were significantly lower than in small centres-about $4.00 compared with $8.50 per citizen per year. Postal services were $3.95 against $6.79.
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* The small centres do much better in only two areas-- garbage disposal and Local Government. The small centres spend $1.51 on garbage and sanitary work against the $2.46 of Melbourne, which clearly requires more sophisticated garbage incinerators and cannot rely so much on open rubbish dumps as the small towns. As for local government administration, this costs almost twice as much in Melbourne, at $5.60, as the $2.86 per citizen per year of the small centres.
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* In total, current costs of urban services in Melbourne come to $71 a year per person against $117 average for eight country centres, which varied individually between $89 and $149. On the capital side the cost of providing overhead services for extra people was found to be much lower in Melbourne than in the smaller centres-$1192 per extra person compared with an average of $3582.</blockquote>
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The opponents of decentralisation could use these figures to tremendous propaganda advantage. They could claim that to house an extra 100,000 people on the fringes of a big city would cost only $120 million in capital services compared with about $360 million in small centres.
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One of the difficulties the report points up is to distinguish between economics of size and economics of fast growth. The mere fact that Melbourne grew the fastest in absolute terms may have been the reason why services could be put on at lower unit costnot that additions were being made to a big city system. Urban facilities are often what economists call 'lumpy' projects. They cannot be built in bits and pieces. That is to say, a new water main has to be built bigger than immediately needed and there are economies in rapidly taking up its full capacity.
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Another defect in the Paterson report is its narrow scope. Urban centres in Victoria are not very big. Most of the more sensible advocates of new cities in Australia have been thinking of the advantages of cities of half a million or so. But the Paterson report certainly puts paid to any idea of just dispersing population round existing small-population centres. It may not put paid to the idea of building new cities of 250,000 or more. But that is not what most of the a flicionados of decentralisation mean when they use their favourite word.
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It is a most valuable report-- an example of how rationality can deflate emotion and of the necessity to base policy on something stronger than unalloyed prejudice. For this reason, it makes one question the validity of the present vogue for opposing present immigration policy on mere hunches. For all we know --until the new studies the Government has ordered have come in-- it is just as likely that it would be more economic to increase our rate of immigration than to reduce it.
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<i>This article originally appeared in "The Bulletin", 27 March 1971, p. 21-22.</i>
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-89590172284508116752007-03-27T23:11:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:12:32.246+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 8 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
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<b><font size="5"> Pollution: The Cost of Clean Living </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By: PETER SAMUEL
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Economics used to be called the dismal science, but compared with the newly modish science of ecology it is almost utopian. The ecologists --or more strictly the collection of people jumping on the bandwagon of conservation and anti-pollution --are the new prophets of doom. There is now a very real danger that by misstating and grossly exaggerating the very important case for a greater concern with the environment, conservationists may be dismissed as cranks. If the case for conservation is stated only by biologists and natural scientists ignorant of politics and economics, then it is not going to get far. In fact, a reaction will set in against it.
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Nevertheless, scientists do recognise the relevance of economics to the environment, even if they make fools of themselves when they enter an area they know so little about.
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The first economic point that needs to be made to the conservationists is that some current economic trends are working very much in their direction. The growth areas of all advanced economies are information (computing, control systems, telecommunications), education, health, tourism, leisuretime activities and the like, and these are 'non-polluting'. Most manufacturing is growing much slower than these activities. And the economic sector which has had the most devastating effect on the environment --agriculture --is hardly growing at all.
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Another point is that a great deal of the growth in productivity which conservationists tend to despise is actually on their side. Many of the great economic advances are associated with more efficient utilisation of natural resources. A ton of steel can now be manufactured using considerably less iron ore and coal and limestone than it could twenty years ago. A ton of steel now means less digging and messing around with the earth. Most of the increases in agricultural production have been achieved without using more land. Very often technological advance reduces pollution; for example, the switches to natural gas and electricity for heating, away from the use of coal, wood, and oil.
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If scientific research is directed specifically toward the problems of pollution it should be possible to make considerable progress. But scientists seem to have lost faith in the possibility of progress. They talk all the time about the impossibility of finding a technological solution to every pollution problem. That no doubt is true. But surely it is also true --though the scientists in their pessimistic mood tend to overlook it --that technological advance can solve many pollution problems and reduce others to satisfactory dimensions.
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The supporters of anti-pollution measures should also recognise that much of the concern about the environment and the demand for conservationist measures is elitist and inegalitarian. Cleaner air must be regarded as a luxury item in most conditions in Australia, for example. It is one thing for the professor of biology with his income of $16,000 a year to be keen on conservation. He probably is very well set up with housing and associated gadgetry, and he can take trips to conferences and elsewhere. His wife does not have to count housekeeping money. For him, the prettiness of the countryside and the freshness of the air are relatively very important, since his other needs are relatively satisfied.
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But this man is part of a very small minority. The average man is on an income of about $5,000 a year and he is often battling to keep up the payments on his house, and he values his modest collection of household gadgets and his car quite highly for the freedom from drudgery, the entertainment and the mobility they give him. He will not be prepared to sacrifice much of these for cleaner air. And similarly he will value the preservation of the countryside less highly than the richer man.
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For the higher-income man it is nothing that he, together with everyone else in Australia, has to pay an extra $50 for his car because of the cost of incorporating anti-pollution devices. But for the man who can only just afford a car, and who is paying hire-purchase interest rates, the anti-pollution regulations will be an unwelcome burden when he is already struggling to maintain a vehicle which will take him and his family into the countryside at weekends or during holidays. At present levels of income and under existing pollution conditions, the majority of Australians are probably not prepared to pay very much for cleaner air and other aspects of a better environment.
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The fact that conservation is often an inegalitarian measure does not mean it is wrong. All sorts of things governments do are inegalitarian --like subsidising the arts. The country would be culturally very impoverished if egalitarianism were the only criterion by which policies of governments were judged.
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And while the mass of present-day Australians might not be prepared to pay a great deal for a better environment and the conservation of the natural wildlife and vegetation, it is a safe bet that future generations of Australians will value these things much more highly. In a generation --twenty-five years' time --Australian per capita incomes should be more than twice what they are now and by then the average householder will have far less difficulty in financing his gadgetry and will be prepared to pay much more to have a good environment. So, to satisfy the needs of the next generation --not to speak of future generations --there is a case for conservation policies now which will preserve a satisfactory environment for them. An environment is not something, like a washing-machine or a house, which can be manufactured to meet immediate needs. It can only be moulded over a long period by positive conservation measures on the one hand and negative 'development' measures on the other. A balance between development and conservation which suits present-day Australians is probably stressing conservation inadequately (and over-emphasising development) for the needs of future generations.
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But the first target of conservationists should be those so-called 'development projects' which are not really development at all, because they are likely to require subsidies to make them go. They should be concentrating their anger on schemes which make neither conservation sense nor economic sense. The elimination of these will both improve the environment and increase people's incomes. There are plenty of uneconomic developments which the conservationists could attack. They did this with great success in the Little Desert affair in Victoria recently. But almost every new rural water-storage project in Australia is uneconomic --because of the paucity of market for the produce of irrigated land. Each of these dams is impoverishing the country by consuming resources in the building which could be used productively elsewhere and by putting into business another collection of farmers who will have to be subsidised steadily over the years ahead. Each dam also impoverishes the environment by submerging vast bush valleys and disrupting the whole ecology of the river downstream. Many of Australia's water birds as well as smaller species of river life are threatened by the changes in river behaviour caused by dams.
<br><br>
Though it is hard to believe, there are governments in Australia still encouraging farmers to grow more. The worst offender is Victoria, which is still clearing bush for new dairy farms, though Western Australia must rank next in silliness with its continuation of land clearance for new wheat farms. The Commonwealth Government is an offender in a less direct manner. By giving extraordinarily generous tax deductions for capital expenditures, it encourages 'development' beyond the limit which is economically sound. And by subsidising fertilisers so heavily it encourages their excessive application. The deleterious effect of fertilisers outside the farm, once they are washed into creeks and rivers and then into the sea, probably means that even what makes economic sense for the individual farmer is an excessive use of fertiliser from the viewpoint of the nation as a whole. Fertilisers, insecticides and other chemicals which pollute the environment should be heavily taxed, not subsidised. (The farmers could get the money gained by the Government back in the form of a straight tax deduction.)
<br><br>
The current crisis in Australian agriculture gives conservationists a heaven-sent opportunity. Because of the world surplus of grains which has developed in the past three years, and seems likely to persist because countries like India are now self-sufficient, the Australian wheat industry must take half its twenty-five million acres out of use. That is equivalent to over half the area of Victoria. Wool prices are going down not because of any conspiracy of Japanese buyers -- if only it were as simple a problem as that! -- but because the market for wool is steadily weakening. Synthetics are being used more, heating in houses, workplaces and cars is making people all over the world dress more lightly. (Like many Canberra people, I do not own an overcoat.) Butter and tobacco are being used less because more people believe they are health hazards. For many items of Australia's agricultural production protective tariffs and import quotas in other countries make the future look grim. And possible British entry into the EEC makes the future of many rural industries look disastrous.
<br><br>
In this context, there is no economic logic in further land clearance for farming or for any more rural dams. There is a positive economic case for progressively taking marginal farms out of agricultural production. 'Let the bush grow back' is a sound slogan for Australia in the 1970s. And it opens new horizons for conservationists. Conservationists can demand an end to policies of agricultural expansion and the beginning of reconstruction, and they should be able to get every taxpayer on side. Every acre of land given back to bush will not only improve the national environment but it will save the nation the costs of surplus agricultural production.
<br><br>
But perhaps the most important advice the economist will give the conservationist is that he should harness the price system to his cause. In other words he should try to extend the economic system based on price incentives into the area of 'the environment' and use it to combat pollution. Use of the price system will generally be more effective and practical than use of direct controls or regulations. Take the example of exhaust emission from cars. Being advised by bureaucrats, governments are in the process of introducing a complicated series of bureaucratic controls. All new cars will have to be fitted, for example, with devices suppressing emission of pollutants below one per cent. This regulation may help somewhat in reducing car-exhaust pollution, but it is an extremely crude device. It means that old cars can go on polluting as before. There is no incentive to the car operator, once he has got his car out of the showroom, to maintain his car so that its pollutant emission is kept down. And there is no incentive to the car manufacturer or fuel supplier to get pollution further below the mandatory ceiling emission set in the regulation. Finally, it is an unfair and wasteful imposition on the country man, who lives in an area of low motor-vehicle density.
<br><br>
Most of the shortcomings of the bureaucratic regulation can be overcome with a 'pollution charge'. Each car owner should be charged an amount proportional to the estimated emission of pollutants from his car. This would be an easily implemented measure as most States now have the requirement that for safety reasons each car is inspected annually when re-registration comes up. Exhaust emission could be measured and related to the miles driven as indicated on the speedometer. The charge could be set at a level which equalled the estimated nuisance value of extra exhaust in the particular registration centre. In country areas there should be no pollution charge, and probably it would not be considered necessary in most smaller towns and cities. In the bigger metropolitan areas it might be substantial and raised steeply should the general problem be judged to be getting more acute.
<br><br>
The pollution charges would give manufacturers an incentive to spend money on research and development into cheaper and better emission-suppression devices, since 'save on emission charges' could become a selling point. In the same way, fuel makers would have an incentive to get the lead and sulphur and other pollutants out of their fuels. And motorists would have an incentive to maintain their cars after purchase in a condition in which their exhaust emission was controlled.
<br><br>
Such pollution charges could also be applied to other processes which vent private garbage into the public domain of the atmosphere: domestic heating systems, industrial plants, airliners.
<br><br>
And why not noise charges in cities, where this is practical? Life in suburbia would be much more pleasant if motor-mowers were taxed proportionately with the noise they make. Again there would be an incentive for the makers to progressively reduce noise levels by introducing new silencing systems and eventually produce new motors and power sources. The regulation that a mower shall not emit more than forty decibels is an inferior rule, because it is set at a level which is 'practical' with existing technology and therefore gives manufacturers no incentive to find improved technology, because it gives the purchaser no incentive to buy the marginally quieter model.
<br><br>
On the other side of the ledger there are private activities in cities which improve the environment of the city community generally as well as benefiting the individual. Tree planting is an example. Surveys in Sydney by the Urban Research Institute recently have shown just how highly suburbanites value the tree-ness of their environment, but each individual cannot do much. The institute thinks there is a clear case for subsidised trees for the suburbs.
<br><br>
The motor car is generally recognised as one of the main damagers and not only because of exhausts. The 'road toll' makes it a major health problem and it requires seemingly endless expenditures on roadways and parking facilities. One approach to the safety problem might be to try to adopt some set of 'danger charges' based on a safety rating of the vehicle. Some car safety features are so valuable that there could be severe fines for not using them. An American estimate puts the average cost of not wearing a seatbelt in terms of extra death, hospitalisation and time lost at about $2000 per $5 seatbelt. There should obviously be a very heavy fine for not wearing a seatbelt. But more general 'danger charges' would give car makers a reason for getting busy designing and introducing other safety features. We have heard for a long time about rapidly inflating air cushions for protecting the occupants of cars in case of collision, but very little real work is being done on this important innovation. Danger charges related to danger ratings (based, say, on survival probability in given collisions) would have the motor industry working like beavers to design and introduce new safety measures.
<br><br>
The non-economists' answer to the obvious overuse of cars in cities is to say let them congest: do not build the new roads and parking stations which seem justified by the existing traffic flows and congestion. The better answer is to start pricing the use of roadspace according to the cost that the motorist imposes by occupying that space. If he puts sufficient value on the mobility he gets out of using the roadspace at a particular time to pay the costs to the community of providing that roadspace, then equity and efficiency dictate that he should be able to get that roadspace to use. If motorists were charged the costs of the use of their roadspace, and if parking charges were everywhere related to the rentable value of the space taken up by parking, then the car would be brought under control. There would be an indicator of the social value of new roads, and a better use of existing roads, since charges in peak hours would encourage a de-peaking of traffic flows. Public transport would be able to compete on a more equal basis with the car.
<br><br>
These are only a few examples of an economic approach to pollution control and an improved environment. A whole range of other measures is obviously needed. Governments spend pitifully small amounts. The Commonwealth could well take more initiatives. Why not a program for the Commonwealth acquiring and running a number of large national parks? And running field-study centres in various places to study and report on changes in the environment as the Weather Bureau reports on the weather? There is obviously a great deal to be done in education, and the idea of 'biological centres' (higher-level zoos which display whole systems of plants and animals together in an ecological setting rather than just the animals in isolation) is most interesting. Finally, the Commonwealth's contribution of $50,000 to the Australian Conservation Foundation is pathetically small in a Federal Budget of $7,000,000,000.
<br><br><br><br>
EDITORIAL NOTE
<br><br>
Since the above was written, farming has become a better business than it once was and the overpopulation prophets have created the fear that chronic food shortage may be around the corner. A little history, however, will show that the present tight supply of rural commodities is at least in part merely one temporary phase of an often repeated cycle of boom and slump in agriculture. There is little doubt that the long-term situation in Western agriculture is one of oversupply. The 'dynamic cobweb' cycle in agriculture often described by economists has in recent times been distorted and extended in period by government 'propping up' operations but cyclic effects must still be expected. The present good market for agricultural products is also partly due to the once-in-a-lifetime coincidence of bad harvests throughout the world. Such coincidences cannot be relied on for long term planning. ( J.J.R. )
<br><br><br><br>
<i>This chapter originally appeared in "The Bulletin", 30 May 1970, p. 39-41.</i>
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-11296355190241803332007-02-27T23:10:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:11:05.572+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 9 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br><br>
<b><font size="5"> Concorde and the Destruction of Ozone </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By S. T. BUTLER
<br><br>
Recent publications by two physicists from Columbia University, U.S.A., are of vital significance with regard to the question of pollution of the upper atmosphere by the exhaust gases of supersonic transports such as the Concorde.
<br><br>
The possible depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere by oxides of nitrogen in the exhaust gases of supersonic aircraft made headlines last year.
<br><br>
Ozone is a type of oxygen which resides in the atmosphere at high altitudes - primarily between 60,000 to 150,000 feet. The molecules of ozone consist of three oxygen atoms joined together, so that ozone is described by the symbol 03. Normal oxygen as we know it consists of two oxygen atoms combined - and has the symbol 02.
<br><br>
Ozone is formed in the first instance by ultraviolet rays in the solar radiation splitting the normal 02 molecules into their separate oxygen atoms. Each one of these, through a series of collisions, may become attached to normal (O2) molecules to produce the ozone (03) molecules.
<br><br>
Ozone molecules are in turn destroyed by being broken up by ultraviolet radiation, or by undergoing chemical reactions with other molecules which exist naturally in the atmosphere - the oxides of nitrogen providing one example.
<br><br>
Thus there is a continuous formation of ozone in the upper atmosphere and a continuous destruction of it. An analogy is that of water flowing into a tank but also running out through holes at the bottom. The water in the tank reaches a certain level, which stays constant when the rate of input is equal to the rate of output. The equilibrium 'level' of ozone in the upper reaches of the atmosphere is determined by the production rate of ozone being balanced by its destruction rate.
<br><br>
In terms of the atmosphere at ground level, the ozone is extremely small in quantity. If all the ozone were compressed to normal atmospheric pressure, it would form a spherical shell around the earth only about 0.3 centimetres thick (a little more than one-tenth of an inch).
<br><br>
Small as this effective thickness of ozone is, it is a highly efficient absorbent of ultraviolet radiation, and evolution on earth has evolved below this absorbing layer.
<br><br>
The ozone is responsible for strongly absorbing ultraviolet radiation of wavelengths which are highly 'biologically active'. These wavelengths are known to be most effective in producing skin cancer and skin inflammations (erythema), and can be damaging to the eyes. If the quantity of ozone were halved, the effects to human and plant life could be disastrous.
<br><br>
This is the crux of the concern about supersonic aircraft flying at high altitudes above about 50,000 feet. Their exhaust gases will inject additional oxides of nitrogen into the atmosphere which will, in effect, put another hole in the tank, so that the average level of ozone in the stratosphere may drop.
<br><br>
In 1971 Professor H. Johnston, of Berkeley Uuiversity, California, calculated that 500 supersonic aircraft, each flying about seven hours a day, might eventually produce a reduction in the quantity of ozone to one-half its present value. Such predictions could not be certain because of unknowns in the rates of the chemical amounts involved, and indeed the quantities of natural oxides of nitrogen which occur in the stratosphere anyway.
<br><br>
Committees were set up in several countries to report on the issue; these included one appointed by the Australian Academy of Science, which expressed the opinion that, on data presently available, it would not expect significant adverse effects to the ozone level from the flying of supersonic aircraft. However, uncertainties remained.
<br><br>
Professor Henry M. Foley, chairman of the Physics Department of the Columbia University, and Professor M. A. Ruderman, visiting Columbia University from the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, have now pointed out that man has already injected into the stratosphere more oxides of nitrogen than would result from the flying of 500 Concordes seven hours a day for nearly ten years. Thus mankind has, albeit unwillingly, already exposed himself to the ozone reduction risk.
<br><br>
Foley and Ruderman point out that oxides of nitrogen are not only products of jet engine exhausts but will automatically be produced at high temperatures as a result of combining of naturally occurring nitrogen and oxygen in the air. This occurs in the 'fireball' of a nuclear explosion, and most of the products of this explosion are injected upwards into the stratosphere.
<br><br>
During one peak period between October 1961 and December 1962, the United States and Russia jointly exploded 340 megatons of nuclear bombs.
<br><br>
Foley and Ruderman calculate that these tests alone injected more oxides of nitrogen into the stratosphere than the flying of 500 Concordes seven hours a day for some five years.
<br><br>
If drastic ozone reduction had occurred, the world would already have felt the consequences. Yet detailed measurements of ozone concentrations over the world-wide system of monitoring stations has shown that in the last ten years the concentration of ozone has in fact slightly increased -- in some latitudes by as much as ten per cent.
<br><br>
The analysis by Foley and Ruderman seems unambiguous and undeniable. Whatever other problems the Anglo-French aircraft may be meeting, it seems that it can be freed from the charge of destruction of the earth's ozone layer.
<br><br>
<br><br>
<i>This chapter originally appeared as an article in "The Sydney Morning Herald", 16 July 1973, p. 7.</i>
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-19200446421144392192007-01-27T23:08:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:09:34.001+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 10 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
This article originally appeared in <i>Nation Review</i>, 8 June 1973, p. 1042.
<br><br>
<b><font size="4"> RHODESIA: IN DEFENCE OF MR SMITH </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By John Ray
<br><br>
To MOST AUSTRALIANS, the Smith regime in Rhodesia is indefensible. They practice blatant racial discrimination, censorship, and imprisonment without trial. A more complete recipe for unpopularity would be hard to imagine. There is, however, more to the picture than is popularly supposed.
<br><br>
Why was Rhodesia not peacefully decolonised like the rest of Britain's African possessions? To answer this we must firstly ask ourselves another and quite basic question: Could white Rhodesians reasonably be expected to subject themselves to another Belgian Congo? Obviously not if they could help it. And in Rhodesia they could help it. They had been self-governing with their own parliament since the 1920s.
<br><br>
All the African decolonisations have been followed by mass slaughters and dictatorships. Some of these we hear little of in Australia because it is only blacks slaughtering blacks, but in Rhodesia all these things are right next door and the Rhodesians are acutely aware of them. If you were in their position, what would you do? Leave. That is certainly what many whites in other parts of Africa did before decolonisation.
<br><br>
In Rhodesia, however, the white community was relatively large (over 200,000 ) , self-sufficient and of long standing. It was their country, where they had been born and where they wanted to stay.
<br><br>
They were not going to throw in the towel and give their country over to another Amin-type dictatorship. But what then, were they going to do with the Africans? ,
<br><br>
The solution proposed was really a rather trusting one. They were going to put all their black people's children in schools and give them the vote as they completed primary education. Basically, only blacks with at least some education would be allowed to have a say in running their country. To cynics among us it may seem a trifle naive, but white Rhodesians were actually prepared to trust the power of education to avoid another bloodbath.
<br><br>
The world said it was not enough. Decolonise now. Give the blacks rule even if the only education they have had is how to use a spear. To the starry eyed idealists of Harold Wilson's British Labour government the realities of Africa didn't seem to matter.
<br><br>
It didn't even seem to matter that the good faith of the white Rhodesians was obvious. They had already succeeded in getting a higher proportion of their black population into schools than any other country in Africa. They had even shown themselves to be flexible on the education rule as the basic qualification for a vote. If an African adult did not have an education, but had shown his adaptation to civilised life by acquiring a certain amount of property or income, then he was given the vote nevertheless.
<br><br>
Since then the Rhodesians have been at war. A trade war, a war of nerves and an outside-sponsored guerilla war. As in all states at war, civil liberties have suffered. Instead of allowing to be tried the one solution that might have allowed the two races to live together in harmony, the outside world has ensured that Rhodesia must undergo that very bloodbath they sought to avoid. The world's Leftists must be proud of themselves.
<br><br>
The only solution now may be for the white Rhodesians to leave their homes, jobs, property and everything else that makes up a comfortable existence and emigrate en masse to some other part of the world. Naturally, they are reluctant to come to this conclusion -and they may yet be right. Despite nit-picking by outsiders, the Rhodesian economy is booming and South Africa has shown that black dissent can be controlled.
<br><br>
The big danger is, however, that if they do have to resort to South African methods to control terrorism (note that as yet there is in Rhodesia nothing like the apartheid system that reigns in South Africa), they may so alienate the blacks that even education will not make it safe to give them the vote. Already this has started. The Rhodesian government has felt itself obliged to raise the educational level which will earn a vote from primary to two years secondary education.
<br><br>
If the governments of the world were sincere in their desire to avoid both a bloody revolution and a South African style system in Rhodesia, they would surely desist in their policy of pushing the whites into a corner. What the whites need is not attack -- there is enough fear in their future already -- but international guarantees for their safety and the security of their property. That way they might be able to afford to run the risk that the rest of the world seems determined to force upon them.
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-23556799711651658712006-12-27T23:07:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:08:12.820+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 11 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
Reprinted from <i>Nation Review</i>, 6 April 1973, p. 753 and written under the pseudonym 'Libertas'.
<br><br>
<b><font size="4"> THE RHODESIA INFORMATION CENTRE </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John Ray
<br><br>
MR WHITLAM and his A.L.P. government have promised that they will restrict our freedom of information 'by legislation, if necessary'. I refer, of course, to one of his first acts on coming to office -- his attempt to have the Rhodesia Information Centre closed down. It is still open at the time of writing.
<br><br>
Legislation then would indeed appear to be necessary. I will predict, however, that it will not quickly be forthcoming. Sir Robert Menzies is on record in Hansard as referring to the Rhodesian prime minister as: 'My friend, Mr Smith' -- so you can imagine how likely the Liberals are to let any such legislation through the Senate.
<br><br>
If it was put up and the Senate did reject it, however, the defeat might be signal enough to require a double dissolution. Can you imagine Mr Whitlam going to the polls on an issue of restricting one of our most treasured freedoms, the freedom to speak? The Senate debate alone would be damaging enough to Labor without fighting an election on the issue, indeed it is some testimony to how disorganised the Liberals were after the last election that they did not take up the issue on these grounds when Whitlam raised it.
<br><br>
'But', you may say, 'what has the Rhodesia Information Centre got to do with free speech? Surely it is just a propaganda outlet?' The answer to that, of course, is that when you agree with it, it is information; when you disagree with it, it is propaganda. As they used to say: 'What's propaganda and what's proper goose?'
<br><br>
'But by propaganda is meant distorted information, and there is no reason to tolerate that!' someone might say. If that is so, why do we tolerate advertising?
<br><br>
Anyhow, who thinks that our press itself is free of bias and distortion? Bias will always be with us. The only safeguard is that everybody be allowed to present his own viewpoint. In comparing the same topic treated by people with opposing biases, we might have at least the chance of finding a golden mean that is somewhere near the truth.
<br><br>
It is a sad comparison that while the former government was in power we did not recognise Communist China. We even fought them (in Korea). And yet one could always go down to the appropriate Communist bookshop and cart away half a ton of pro-Chinese literature if that was one's inclination. Mr Whitlam doesn't want to allow the same freedom to supporters of a regime he does not recognise or approve of.
<br><br>
This just bears out the suggestion implicit in my own <i>nom de plume</i> -- that in our society it is the conservatives who are the guardians of liberty and the rights of the individual, not the socialists. This is in fact traditional. It was the conservatives who believed in free enterprise and thought the free world was worth fighting for.
<br><br>
Not of course that Labor leaders don't acknowledge their commitment to free speech in the abstract. It is when it comes down to actually allowing people to hear something that Labor does not like them to hear that we see how different words are from deeds. Mr Whitlam went to the polls with the promise of 'more open government' and specifically justified this policy with the assertion that we all have a 'right to know'. This policy, however, was formulated in the belief that it would help embarrass the former Liberal government. That it might embarrass Labor was not seriously foreseen.
<br><br>
Whitlam's policy then seems to boil down to 'freedom of speech for those who agree with me'. Not so different from Joe Stalin after all.
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-8139412944007482802006-11-27T23:05:00.000+10:002008-02-27T23:06:42.689+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 12 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974
<br><br>
The article originally appeared under the pseudonym 'Libertas' in "Nation Review", 19 April 1973, p. 816. </i>
<br><br>
<b><font size="4"> RACISM IN AUSTRALIA? </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John Ray
<br><br>
When you dislike a man who is black, that does not make you a racist. You are a racist only if you dislike him <i>because</i> he is black. This is a simple truth and yet I will venture to assert that much of what small 'l' liberals today call 'racism' falls into the first rather than into the latter category.
<br><br>
Take this affair recently headlined as <i>Racism in Redfern</i>. Several hundred white residents petitioned the local council to bar the takeover of several terrace houses in their area for the purpose of setting up an 'Aboriginal community'. Does this mean American style colour prejudice has come to Australia? Sydney television showed that there were indeed violent emotions involved --- with an actual confrontation between a white protester and a black organiser being shown.
<br><br>
The grounds for protest were informative, however. Aborigines were in fact already squatting in many of these terrace houses and the local residents had come to find them singularly unpleasant neighbours -- drunken shouting, fighting and bottle smashing at all hours of almost every night -- aboriginals urinating in the street and shouting obscenities at passing white housewives. Who would not want to see the last of neighbours such as that -- whether they were black, white or had purple polka dots?
<br><br>
It is in fact a most violent denial of civil rights if we stigmatise people who protest against such things as 'racists' just because the offensive group is identifiable in terms of colour. Black is not beautiful -- any more than white is.
<br><br>
The greatest obstacle to a reasoned discussion of white 'backlash' is an unstated assumption by many of Australia's suburbanites that Aborigines are just the same as they are except that they have a brown skin. It is this assumption that makes what anti-aboriginal protesters say seem so unintelligible and unreasonable. 'I wouldn't like someone to object to me just because I had a brown skin,' the suburbanite says.
<br><br>
Of course the anti-Aborigine protester is not just objecting to skin colour. He could scarcely be so puerile. He objects to what does factually go with skin colour -- habits, behaviour and practices that white society has long preached against and condemns. If it were just the colour of their skin that set Aborigines apart, there would be no backlash.
<br><br>
It is then this fact that Aborigines are characterised by behaviour that in a white we would find despicable that suburban small 'l' liberals find so hard to absorb. I know of several instances where such liberals, when actually meeting Aborigines for the first time, have suddenly become much more conservative in their views. It is well-known that it is in country towns and depressed urban areas that anti-Aborigine feeling runs high. What people from both types of areas have in common is that they have actually met and lived near Aborigines. They know what they're talking about.
<br><br>
Obviously, there is no necessary assumption that these differences between Aborigines and whites are inborn. All of them could be attributed to differences in upbringing. We come from a culture that values privacy, hygiene and industriousness. Aborigines do not. We see the virtue of competition and emotional reserve. Aborigines do not.
<br><br>
White backlash is then reasonable. Unless we expect whites to forget overnight the cultural values that they have learned and practised all their lives, they will find the proximity of Aborigines unpleasant.
<br><br>
There are three possible solutions to this problem: change the whites; change the Aborigines; or have the two groups live apart. The first two solutions seem totally presumptuous and paternalistic -- if not fascist. The last is the solution that has usually emerged. Blacks and whites, if left to themselves, normally do live in separate communities. It is only when governments and ideology-blinded white do-gooders interfere with the natural selection processes that problems arise.
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-47175872556789865492006-10-26T23:17:00.004+10:002008-02-26T23:31:58.802+10:00<br><br>
<i>Journal of Human Relations</i>, 1972, 20, 71-75.
<br><br>
<i>Also reprinted as Chapter 13 in: J.J. Ray (Ed.)"Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
<font color="#ff0000">Note: The article below does of course offend against the common Leftist claim that there is no such thing as race. Anybody who takes that claim seriously should perhaps read <a href="http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20070526/jonjayray.batcave.net/race.html"> this article</a> as a preamble to what appears below.</font>
<br><br><br><br>
<b><font size="4"> ARE ALL RACES EQUALLY INTELLIGENT? -- OR: WHEN IS KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE?
</font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John J. Ray
<br><br>
There has recently been an extensive controversy in the psychology literature on the possible genetic base of racial differences in intelligence. This has been so acrimonious as to inspire the thought that the controversy itself forms an interesting case-study in the sociology of knowledge. I refer to the articles by Jensen (1968 and 1969) and Garrett (1969). One outcome of these controversies is the apparently justified accusation by Jensen (1969b) that an important body of his colleagues (the members of the council of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) indulged in "propaganda" and disregard for the facts of the issue. Garrett (1969) makes similar observations. As Van den Haag (1969) points out, the cause of equalitarianism seems to have induced some remarkable failures of reasoning even among normally eminent social scientists. How may these phenomena be explained?
<br><br>
<i>Study of Intelligence as the Hereditary Given</i>
<br><br>
Before one can understand what is really going on in this controversy, it is necessary briefly to recapitulate some basic findings.
<br><br>
There is no doubt that American Negroes obtain lower average scores on standard intelligence tests than do American whites (Tyler, 1965, p. 306; Garrett; 1969). In fact the differences found are often so large and so regular in their incidence that this might be held to be one of the most impressive uniformities in the whole of psychological measurement.
<br><br>
To use Hebb's (1949) terminology there are two types of intelligence -- A and B. Intelligence A is the inborn, hereditary "given" whereas intelligence B is intelligence as measured, i.e. intelligence A plus some variable overlay of learned problem-solving strategies. It is mean differences across races in intelligence A that is of concern here.
<br><br>
<i>Substitution of Ideology for Science</i>
<br><br>
The way to assess differences in intelligence A is to control or equalize the influences and opportunities affecting the B Component. When this is done, differences remaining are attributable to intelligence A variations. Tanser (1939), Bruce (1940), and McQueen and Browning (1960) have carried out such studies where environmental influences on white and Negro groups have been controlled. All reported significant superiority of the white groups. In spite of this, most psychologists (Tyler, 1965, 9, 300) continue to claim that there are no innate differences in intelligence between whites and Negroes. The usual reason advanced for adherence to this <i>credo</i> is that the tests used must in some way be unfair to non-members of the dominant white culture (even though the Negroes and whites of Tanser's study had attended the same schools since 1890!). If this claim is true, how does one explain the consistent finding (Pintner, 1931) that Chinese and Japanese school-children get average test scores equal to or above those of American whites? One is asked to believe that the tests are unfair to people who have sat in the same classrooms as whites but not unfair to Chinese and Japanese who have a totally different cultural background.
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Why is it that psychologists, who are most in a position to observe racial differences in intelligence, resolutely refuse to believe the evidence before their eyes? The answer to this is, I believe, an instructive, if sad, incident in the sociology of knowledge. Often drawn to their profession by humane or humanitarian considerations, psychologists are so committed to the belief that whites and Negroes morally should be treated equally that they seem to conclude, albeit unconsciously, that the best way of securing this morally desirable end is to convince people that whites and Negroes in fact are ontologically equal. If the facts fell into line with this account, all would be well, but as it is, the present author would question whether any moral goal is ultimately well served by denying reality as it is. If there are native differences in intelligence, our strategy in pursuing humanitarian goals must presumably become more adaptive by a recognition of it.
<br><br>
This question of the ideology subscribed to by the scientist is also relevant to the question of what we accept as a criterion for evidence. There have been many attempts to construct "culture fair" tests but their application has not been successful in removing Negro-white differences. We must then at some point ask ourselves: "When do we stop?" When do we consider the case proved? When do we start to conclude that there might not after all be some real difference there that is not attributable to a measurement artifact? Given the impressive uniformity of the findings to date, it seems abundantly clear that the existence of a real difference between races would long ago have been considered to have been proven out of hand were it not for an ideological commitment to the opposite viewpoint.
<br><br>
<i>When is Moral Moral?</i>
<br><br>
Just how much ideology can cause even an outstanding psychologist to drift into self-deception is exemplified in the position taken by McElwain (1970). McElwain is head of the Department of Psychology at Australia's largest university (Queensland) and author of the definitive "Queensland Test" of Aboriginal intelligence. This test was normed and validated on Aboriginal groups themselves. It includes only those sub-tests which could be shown to discriminate within the Aboriginal population. Although he does not appear to have committed himself in print, he has repeated to the present author in writing, an assertion often made to his students -- that when the Queensland test is given also to whites, a negative relationship between the discriminating power of a subtest within the Aboriginal population and the size of the gap between white and Aboriginal mean scores appears, i.e., as the test gets better so Aborigines rose closer to whites in average test scores. From this McElwain appears to suggest that if we got a really discriminating test, the difference between whites and Aborigines would disappear altogether.
<br><br>
Here, then, McElwain appears to commit the same fallacy in reverse that is so frequently alleged against tests normed and validated for whites! A test is designed specifically for an Aboriginal culture and yet whites still get higher scores on it! The amazing thing is that whites do not get lower scores on it. Of course the discriminating power and the size of the cross-racial gap are related. As the test is more and more characteristically Aboriginal in specific background, so whites are more and more disadvantaged. A true comparison study of the question set by this paper using the Queensland's test would require that a group of whites be found who shared an environmental background similar to the Aborigine culture. In that case only, might mean scores on McElwain's test be reasonably compared across the two racial groups.
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If racial differences exist how do we explain them? A possible explanation is the ecological one: different racial groups develop different areas of excellence according to the specific demands of their characteristic environment. In the harsh European climate, forethought (symbolic thought) has historically been essential to survival -- particularly through the long winters. In Africa these same mental qualities have not had the same relative importance. Because of the more beneficient climate the importance of certain physical and psychomotor abilities has risen in comparison. In time the process of natural selection has ensured that these differentia became racially fixed. With the different characteristic environments of the white and Negro races, it would in fact be highly surprising to find similar levels in all abilities. What one would expect and what one does, I believe, find is that whites would be higher on cognitive abilities and Negroes higher on certain physical abilities.
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Using the concept of a morality hierarchy proposed by Hampden-Turner and Whitten (1971) it might be said in fact that the attempt to deny the <i>empirical</i> findings of racial differences in intelligence in order to secure the <i>moral</i> goal of having all races treated equally represents a very low level of moral maturity. The person at the highest stage of moral development would presumably not need to have his moral resolve to <i>treat</i> people equally bolstered by assertions that people <i>are</i> equal anyhow. He would be anxious to do justice to the empirical findings in the awareness that they are essentially irrelevant to the moral decision he has made.
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For the future then, humanitarian aims might perhaps best be served by abandoning the unlikely enterprise of proving all men equal. Instead, perhaps, we might concentrate on the question of what the difference between groups are -- and how differences might be used in the betterment of all.
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<b>REFERENCES</b>
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Bruce, M. 1940. "Factors Affecting Intelligence Test Performance of Whites and Negroes in the Rural South." Archives of Psychology, No. 252.
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Garrett, H. E. 1969. "Reply to Psychology Class 338 (Honours Section)." American Psychologist. 24:390-391.
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Hampden-Turner, C. and Whitten, P. 1971. "Morals Left and Right." Psychology Today. 4:39-43, 74-76.
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Haag, E, van den. 1969. "Addendum to Jensen." American Psychologist. 24:1042.
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Hebb, D. O. 1949. The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley.
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Jensen, A. R. 1968. "Social Class, Race and Genetics: Implications for Education." American Educational Research Journal, 5:1-42.
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Jensen, A. R. 1969(a). "How Much Can We Boost LQ. and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review. 39:1-123.
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Jensen, A. R. t969(b). "Criticism or Propaganda?" American Psychologist. 24: 1040-1041
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McQueen, R., and Browning, C. 1960. "The Intelligence and Educational Achievement of a Matched Sample of White and Negro Students." School and Society. 88:327-329.
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McElwain, D. W. 1970. Personal communication.
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Pintner, R. 1931. Intelligence Testing. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Chapter 20.
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Tanser, H. A. 1939. The Settlement of Negroes in Kent County, Ontario. Chatham, Ontario: Shephard Publishing Co.
<br><br>
Tyler, L. E. 1965. The Psychology of Human Differences. New York: Appleton, Century Crofts. Chapter 12,
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-81588015749329506622006-09-26T23:14:00.001+10:002008-02-26T23:16:43.980+10:00<br><br>
<i>(Chapter 11 in: F.S. Stevens (Ed.) "Racism: The Australian Experience, volume 3". Sydney: ANZ Book Co., 1972)</I>
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<i>Also reprinted as Chapter 14 in: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
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<br><br>
<b><font size="4"> IN DEFENCE OF AUSTRALIA'S POLICY TOWARDS NON-WHITE IMMIGRATION </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John Ray
<br><br>
Among academics there is widespread criticism of Australia's immigration policies. 'White Australia' is definitely a dirty word among much of Australia's intelligentsia. The defences that one normally hears of Australia's policy generally come from politicians rather than from academics in the social sciences (see, for instance 'The evolution of a policy' by the Hon. Phillip Lynch, M.P.-- former Minister for Immigration). In this paper I wish, as both a social scientist and as a conservative, to rebut the usual criticisms made by academics and positively to argue for Australia's present policy.
<br><br>
Some of the criticism one reads, even in reputable academic journals, is so incoherent on the rational level as to be very difficult to answer at all. The article by the anthropologist, Ian Bedford, for instance, (in <i>Politics</i> of 1970, pp. 224-227) contains the bald assertion that: "If the Australian is not to make war on the Asian in Asia, he must live with him on his own soil" -- and a whole series of similar statements whose only support seems to be the moral rectitude of their writer. This writer indeed seems to be characterized by that very 'intolerance of ambiguity' for which the racially prejudiced person has long been slated (e.g. Adorno et al., 1950; Rokeach, 1960). He argues that Australia should allow much more Asian migration just so we will have another Rhodesia here. For the sake of showing white Australians clearly to belong in the 'Baddie' camp of Bedford's conceptual world, he is prepared to encourage all the suffering among, and injustice toward non-white races that he believes to have arisen in Rhodesia. He expects Australia to erupt in bloodshed and riot without the White Australia policy. And it is this that he advocates. It is this that he sees as desirable. For what gain? To show us up as what he believes we really are. This, then, is surely an example of, and a testimony to, the way in which moralism can distort our thinking into working against not only our own self-interest but also against moral ideals themselves.
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Among the saner advocates of increased non-white immigration, however, different arguments are generally advanced. As far as I am able to summarize them, they seem to go as follows: 1. Australia is too culturally isolated and inward-looking; 2. Our policy angers other (Asian) nations; 3. We have a moral obligation to help the suffering humanity of Asia in every way we can; 4. Any form of discrimination on racial grounds is, in principle, morally offensive; 5. The gain to Australia would be greater than the loss even in purely material terms. 6. Racism is evil and we should force everybody to become non-racists. I will consider these arguments one by one.
<br><br>
The first is certainly the most superficial and easily refutable point. It is abundantly clear that, on the world scene, Australia has more cultural diversity than most. With several million migrants from all parts of Europe in its population, Australia has a wealth of cultural diversity that few societies in the world could equal. Roughly one fifth of Australia's population was not born in Australia. Is this true of India, of China, of the U.S.A. or of most countries Australia might be compared with? The great European cultures that have made the world in their image are all represented here in strength. Asia and Africa are falling over themselves to emulate the Coca-cola culture and successful materialism of the European world. Are we to weep that we are not being exposed to what Asia itself is rejecting? Being electronically open to and in communication with all the world, Australia is right in the main stream of the world's cultural and intellectual developments. The music of a new composer or the new social theories of a great thinker might reach Australia a few months after they have reached the U.S.A. but is this cause for self-castigation or derogatory comparison with someone such as the Asian peasant who is cut off <i>entirely</i> from the world's intellectual community? If Australia is indeed culturally isolated and inward-looking, then, on the same criteria, all but a tiny percentage of the world's population must be similarly condemned. Sydney and Melbourne are infinitely closer to the New Yorks and Londons of the world (or whatever other great cultural centres one has in mind) than are the Rangoons or Timbuctoos. When I go to the theatre in Sydney, I have a choice of plays that would not, in terms of number and variety, invite derogatory comparison with many other cities in the world. I can go to any number of Greek restaurants in Sydney (or for that matter Chinese, Indian, Italian, Lebanese or Yugoslav restaurants) and drink Greek wine while a roomful of Greeks around me drink Australian beer. In terms of cultural variety the comparison we need fear would be hard to draw. Paris? Perhaps. Peking? No. Even Tokyo, for all its commercialized (and Western) variety, hears fewer foreign accents than we. One may, of course, advocate that we be exposed to a <i>different sort</i> of variety, but variety <i>per se</i> we do have --- <i>par excellence</i>. I myself feel that I have more to learn from a refugee Romanian Jew than I have to learn from an Asian peasant whose one aspiration in life is to own a bicycle. So then, by any standard of <i>objective</i> comparison, I would like to claim that Australia is an intensely cosmopolitan and urban society centred around its two great metropolises -- highly advanced, taking the best that the world has to offer and itself contributing at least its fair share to the dominant world culture of which it forms a part. Personally, I might welcome greater immigration to Australia of educated Indians and Africans because of the refreshing skepticism and <i>joie de vivre</i> that these groups might respectively contribute to our culture, but so to say is to imply a consciousness that any society -- even the very best -- can be improved. It is not to say that the society we presently have is at all a bad one in the respect under discussion.
<br><br>
The second criticism listed above is that our policy angers Asian nations. This is an assertion about which it is hard for either side to be factual. Most nations of the world do have restrictive immigration policies and ours in fact would rate among the more liberal. Nearly all the Asian nations themselves forbid people other than those of their own race from settling and acquiring citizenship. Indeed, others of their own race might not even be welcome. The one country that has made public protest about our policy in recent times is Japan -- a country which itself is almost fanatically ethnocentric and oppressive towards its own small Korean minority. Their protest against our policy is, in fact, the protest of a country which <i>forbids</i> permanent immigration of foreigners against a country which will accept any number of Japanese applicants of sufficient educational standards. Unlike the U.S.A., there are <i>no</i> quota restrictions on Asian settlement in Australia. The only restrictions are educational. Our Immigration Department statistics regularly reveal, in fact, that of those Asians whose application to settle here is approved, not much more than half actually come. From 1966 to 1971 (inclusive), 7,000 applications to immigrate made by Asians were approved but only 3,200 actually arrived. Many Asian countries are in fact themselves most unwilling to allow their people to leave (Taiwan being perhaps the most extreme example), so our policy, in fact, ought to accord well with what they themselves want. In summary then, the only evidence we have for Asian irritation with our policies is the case of Japan. Given Japan's own policy, however, we cannot see this criticism as very deep-seated or defensible. A situation that <i>would</i>, of course, draw criticism from Asian nations would be if we did have here a substantial minority of their people and ill-treated them. Witness the criticisms of Britain by the Afro-Asian nations or of South Africa by the black African nations. Since it is most implausible to believe that Australians would he more tolerant than Britons, our present policy can be seen as one that ensures that we do <i>not</i> anger Asian nations.
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The third criticism listed above is that we have a moral obligation to help the suffering humanity of Asia in every way we can. In answer to this I could well make here the usual observations about the relative efficacy of foreign aid versus immigrant intake and I am sure that an impressive case could be made for the claim that the best place to help Asians is in Asia. One could even argue that importing a tiny minority of the Asian population into our midst (into what is, for them, an alien society) would be counter-productive to the welfare of both the individuals concerned and of the countries concerned. What I want to do instead of this however, is to challenge the basic premise that we are under a moral obligation. I would contend that the entire conception of Right and Wrong here involved is faulty. The existence of a <i>discoverable</i> right and wrong is implied in the criticism. Against this we must put the commonplace among many educated people today that there is no such thing as an absolute Right and Wrong. At least since Nietzsche (1906) and Sorel (1915) the existence of moral properties has also been widely questioned among philosophers and social scientists. It is true that the two statements 'X is pink' and 'X is right' have the same grammatical form. While 'pink' does indeed describe a property of the object, 'right' would seem rather to describe our reaction to the object or action. The rightness of some action exists in our opinion of it -- not in the action itself. 'Rightness' attributed to some action is therefore a fraudulent attribution -- designed to provoke argument, discussion or consensus in a pseudo-objective form. It is a polite (but misleading) way of saying 'I favour X' -- or, at best, 'all men would favour X if they had proper consideration for their own long-term self-interest'. If the moralist claims that something other than self-interest is involved, he must at least show where his moral basis emanates from. How does he know whether a thing is an instance of the category 'a right action' ( or 'an action which we are morally obliged to perform')? If God is the source of our moral information one has to be a metaphysician to be a moralist. Since I am not a metaphysician I am not impressed. Even if I was a metaphysician how could I be sure that I was getting the correct account of what God's will is? Given the divisions among religious people on moral questions, it would seem that moral information is not only metaphysical information but metaphysical information of a particularly uncertain sort. The only possible non-metaphysical answer that a moralist can give for the source of his moral information is to say that what is morally right is what he likes, or what all men would like in some optimum situation. The moral information is not to be gained from the action itself. A moralist will see taking up sword (or whatever example of an action one has in mind) as right on one occasion but wrong on another. The action has not changed --only our response to it (a response that is, of course, dictated by circumstances). Applying this to the question in hand, we must translate the contention here at issue as: 'I would approve of us helping the starving millions of Asia in any way we can'. This, of course, deprives the original assertion of its original imperative force. The utterer wished not only to report his own feelings but also to influence us to act in accordance with those inclinations of his. He could have said, 'Thou shalt help ... etc.' but this would not have succeeded in influencing us unless he had direct power over us. He therefore resorted to the subterfuge of moralism and endeavoured to convince us that we were under an obligation similar to a contractual obligation. Once this subterfuge is perceived however we must immediately be interested to ask, 'What is the origin of this obligation? Contractual obligations arise when we exchange one service for another but no such exchange has been undertaken on the present occasion'. In answer to this, the moralist can only resort to the Deity or some other mystical or hypothetical source of obligation. Alternatively he can abandon morality altogether and argue that it would be in our best long term self-interest to act in the manner he advocates. If he does this, the burden of proving his new empirical assertion is thrown upon him. He must advance arguments such as the two considered first above in order to show us that it is, in fact, the case that acting as he advocates would further our long-term self-interest. He may, of course, resort to arguments of a more general sort than the ones considered above. He may say something like: 'It is always wise to be benevolent'. This however is a contentious statement and requires proof. If 'benevolent' is defined in some non-circular way, it can surely be shown that some benevolent acts might not lead to the long-term advantage of any party. One has in mind such adages as 'Sometimes you've got to be cruel to be kind'. Surely the European nations were being benevolent in allowing Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland in the mid-1930s but it would be a brave spirit who would argue that this action was to our long-term self-advantage. Whether benevolence is wise also depends on what our goals are. If we enjoy aggression or the humiliation and suffering of others, then benevolence will obviously be less often wise than if we are otherwise motivated. Obviously then, general rules such as 'It is always wise to be benevolent' just will not work as such. At best they are guides to consider accepting when we have no other information as to the consequences of our actions or when such information as we do have leads to irresolvably conflicting conclusions. In all situations, our first preference must be to argue each case on its individual merits. It is this, then, that the advocate of change in our immigration policies has to do. He has to show that a change is to our advantage in this particular case. His primary reason for so arguing may not, of course, be that he believes a change would be to our advantage. While some advocates may be in this category, I believe that the greatest number would be people who have been conditioned in their upbringing to accepting as true, parental assertions that some acts are good or bad of themselves.
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Little Johnny is told that it is <i>bad</i> to act in a certain way -- not that such an act is disliked by the parent (for whatever reason). Although it will not stand up to rational scrutiny, such children may often accept the inculcated belief that the act itself has this imputed property of 'badness' in some way intrinsic to it. The acceptance that certain acts have a property of 'badness' is also associated with (conditioned) negative affect towards such acts. Therefore, any acts that seem similar to acts that the child has accepted to have this property of 'badness' will suffer from generalization of negative affect. The adult feels (not necessarily consciously) that prohibiting unlimited Asian immigration is similar to acts that he was conditioned to avoid as a child. His advocacy of freer migration may therefore be dictated, not by rational considerations, but by generalized conditioned negative affect. Presumably, however, most of us would want to give more thought to our own long-term advantage in this particular situation than following our immediate emotional impulses. That the moralist's conditioned affect is a poor basis for action can also be appreciated if we reflect that others may not share that affect or even have conditioned affect of opposite effect. Where different people have opposite affective responses to the same actions, we cannot expect argument to alter the affect in any way but we might, if we are optimistic, hope that the policy actually adopted by the parties concerned would be decided on rational considerations of long-term self-interest. If this is to happen, debate on the likely outcomes of the alternative policies is essential before our estimation of the relative advantages to us can be made. Moralistic utterances cannot contribute to such a debate. This dismissal of moralistic utterances as nonsensical does then dispose of not only argument 3 above, but also of arguments 4 and 6. Argument 6, however, could be recast as: 'It would be in our interest to force people to become non-racists'. It is in this form that it will be considered below.
<br><br>
Before that, however, we will move on to argument 5 -- that the gain to Australia of freer Asian migration would be greater than the loss even in purely material terms. Such arguments generally turn on the economic advantages of immigration <i>per se</i> -- such as the elimination of upbringing expenses and the greater entrepreneurial motivation and rate of capital accumulation among migrants. It is proposed that the latter might be higher among Asian migrants and that we could be more selective of educational level etc. if we gave ourselves Asia to pick and choose from as well as Europe. Also falling under this general rubric, is the argument that we could correct the imbalance of the sexes in Australia by importing large numbers of Asian women.
<br><br>
Since Australia's per capita rate of capital accumulation is second only to Japan's and since the migrants we already get do have an average level of education higher than that of native Australians, it is evident that, even though it might in theory be possible to do better, we are certainly not doing at all badly already. Even if we were to make a concerted effort to get the cream of Asian society here, this would be at great cost to those societies and would certainly not be permitted by them. Because average educational levels are so much higher in Europe than in Asia, anxiety not to offend other nations by attempting to drain off their best talent would alone constitute sufficient reason to concentrate our immigrant-seeking activities on Europe. The loss of one professional man is an immeasurably greater loss to Asia than it is to Europe. The third proposal to correct the abnormal preponderance of men in Australia by importing Asian women is probably a rather facetious one. It has obvious difficulties associated with the acceptability of women from a vastly different culture to unwed Australian men and is also a policy unlikely to gain acceptance from the Asian nations concerned.
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The sixth point listed above is not readily disputable in its revised form -- but it also has lost most of its impact in the revision. Obviously if all people were not racists this would solve a lot of problems. The point is, however, that bringing Asian migrants here is certainly not the way to achieve this. Britain's experience suggests in fact that this would lead to the <i>emergence</i> of racism. If we want people to become non-racists the only way is the slow sure way of more education.
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Having now seen that the reasons why we <i>should</i> have more Asian migration do not stand up well to fuller consideration, we may ask: 'Are there any reasons why we <i>should not</i> have more Asian migration? The answers I want to suggest to this are, in general, so well known as to appear <i>passe</i> but the only answer the Left can generally produce to them takes the form of misapplying a psychiatric but clearly pejorative label such as 'paranoid'.
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Let us face the fact that large numbers of even educated Australians do not like Jews or 'Wogs'. This is not concentration camp mentality. It is simply the perceptual discrimination of identifiably different characteristics in these people and the personal preference of not liking such characteristics. The concept of national characteristics stands in somewhat of a bad odour today but for all that it remains true that people who travel overseas have no difficulty in naming what those characteristics are (Cf. Madariaga, 1970). To say that Italians are more emotional is not at all to deny that some Italians are not emotional. It is simply to say that emotionality is more common among Italians than it is among us. We all have personal preferences about what we like in other people. If Italians are more emotional and we don't approve of emotionality -- (for us a cultural value), it makes perfect sense not to like Italians or any other group that is similarly characterized. Disliking Italians in this way is not even inconsistent with liking some individual Italians. I personally don't like marmalade jams but I have occasionally tasted a marmalade jam that I did like. In spite of the exceptions, when I go to the supermarket, I don't buy marmalade. Similarly I once knew even an ardent neo-Nazi who regarded the white race as the only one with a right to exist. One of his best friends and most constant associates was a Pakistani who was nearly as black as the proverbial ace of spades. Some exceptions don't necessarily disturb a rule. Following this line of reasoning through, if Australians like English migrants most and Asian migrants least, it is English migrants we should choose. This may be ethnocentric but it is not racist. The ethnocentric places a high value on those characteristics that are prominent in his own group. The racist actively persecutes members of other groups. Many superbly functioning and well-adjusted Australians I know will justly deny being racists and honestly deplore and condemn Hitler's concentration camps. Yet these same people will, among friends, exchange mocking misnomers for suburbs in which Jews have settled: Bellevue Hill becomes 'BelleJew Hill' and Rose Bay becomes 'Nose Bay'; Dover Heights becomes 'Jehovah Heights'. On the issue of admitting Jews to their exclusive schools and clubs, these WASPs will say: 'We let a few of them in-just to show we're not prejudiced'. If this feeling exists towards a group demonstrably not of inferior educational or cultural standards and which is not easily distinguished by something as salient as skin colour, how much more feeling must be expected against Asians? As happened with Great Britain, ethnocentrism could erupt into racism. Large numbers of Asians are readily accepted in our University communities but outside the sheltered world of academe things are different. We do have in Australia our own long-established Asian communities and we do have a continuing flow of Asian migrants. Pragmatic management has so far kept the proportion of Asians to a level where racism has not evolved. Let not moralists stampede us from this policy into something that can advantage no-one. The misguided compulsions of moralism offer us the prospect of transforming Sydney into another New York. Against this, I advocate enlightened self interest and an Australia not torn by racial tensions. At present I can walk alone at night through the streets of Sydney without fear. I would like to keep it that way.
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<b>REFERENCES</b>
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ADORNO, T. W., FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, ELSE, LEVINSON, D. J., & SANFORD, R. N. The authoritarian personality: Harper, N.Y., 1950.
<br><br>
BEDFORD, I. White Australia, the Fear of Others, Politics, 1970, 5, 224-227.
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DEPARTMENT OF IMMIGRATION Australia's Immigration policy: Government Printer, Canberra, 1910.
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LYNCH, P. The evolution of a policy: Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1971.
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MADARIAGA, S. De. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards: An essay in comparative psychology 2nd. ed.: Pitman, London, 1970.
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NIETZSCHE, F. Beyond good and evil (vol. 12 of The complete works. Ed.: O. LEVY) Foulis, Edinburgh, 1911.
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ROKEACH, M. The open and closed mind: Basic Books, N.Y., 1960.
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SOREL, G. Reflections on violence" (Trans. T. E. Hulme ) : Allen & Unwin, London, 1915.
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<font size="+2"><b>POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDA</b></font>
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<i>1). I reproduce below a <a href="http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2004_09_26_dissectleft_archive.html ">blog post</a> I put up on Sept 30, 2004: </i>
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I WAS WRONG
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"I note that Keith Burgess-Jackson has a post up explaining why he has reversed his view of President Bush and why he no longer advocates liberalism in general. Heaps of conservative thinkers have at one time been Left-leaning (including Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill) so all of them must have had to do a lot of explaining at some stage. I am pleased that I have never had to do that but I am also pleased to say that I have been wrong in the past on some matters nonetheless. I am pleased to find that I was wrong because it shows that I have learned something.
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The mistake I made which I most regret was to underestimate the good nature and tolerance of my fellow Australians. In an article I wrote in 1972, I expressed the view that admitting large numbers of ethnic Chinese immigrants to Australia could well cause racial strife—as indeed it actually did in the Australia of 100 years ago or more. In the last 30 years, however, Australia has admitted large numbers of ethnic Chinese immigrants so that they are now probably around 10% of the population—but there seems to have been no friction between them and other Australians whatever. Note however that it was my fellow Anglo-Australians that I doubted. I have never doubted the civilized qualities of the Chinese".
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2). In the last half a dozen sentences of the article above, I was (as I said) envisaging what moralism could eventually lead to: No restrictions on immigration at all -- with its attendant problems.
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3). My pessimism was shared by a much more eminent Australian than I and for much the same reasons:
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As Opposition Leader in 1988, Mr Howard attacked Asian immigration.... His comment in August 1988 was: "I wouldn't like to see it (the rate of Asian immigration) greater. I'm not in favour of going back to a White Australia policy. I do believe that if it is in the eyes of some in the community that it's too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater."
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Like me, Prime Minister Howard was delighted when he found that his fears had not been realized.
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Click <a href="http://ray-dox.blogspot.com/2005/11/john-ray-on-moral-philosophy-full-list.html">here</a> for a list of all John Ray's comments on moral philosophy
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-10092366436714515852006-08-26T23:12:00.000+10:002008-02-26T23:13:19.505+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 15 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
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<b><font size="5"> Economic Growth-Blessing or Curse?</font></b>
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By J.W. NEVILE
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TEN OR TWELVE years ago economic growth seemed to be universally considered one of the fundamental values that no one questioned, like Motherhood and God. John F. Kennedy beat Nixon in the Presidential race in the United States partly because he pointed to the low rate of growth of the American economy under Eisenhower and promised that the economy would grow more rapidly when he was president. In the United Kingdom Wilson won an election with the slogan 'Get Britain moving again'. In Australia newspapers had economic supplements with titles such as 'Australia Unlimited'. Economic growth was the thing and its high priests, the economists, seemed to attribute to it all virtues - even mystical ones. The first great modern economist, Adam Smith, was often quoted to the effect that:
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<blockquote>Growth endows the community with a sense of vigour and social purpose. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and hearty state to all different orders of the society. The stationary (state) is dull, the declining (state is) melancholy.</blockquote>
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Now, scarcely ten years later, economic growth has become a dirty word in some quarters. The zero-population growth movement has already grown into the zero-production growth movement. Even economists are writing books entitled <i>The Costs of Growth</i> and wondering aloud whether or not their former idol perhaps after all has feet of clay.
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Is economic growth then a wonderful blessing that no nation can afford to be without? Is it an unmitigated curse that if not countered will lead us inevitably to global disaster? If the truth lies somewhere between these extremes -- as certainly it does -- is economic growth more of a blessing or more of a curse?
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I am a growth man myself, and most of us are only too aware of deficiencies in our society -- both considered nationally and globally -- that can only be overcome by the increase in material resources, which are part of the fruits of economic growth. Most of us are painfully aware of the needs right here in Australia for better social services to eliminate poverty, better hospitals, better schools, not to mention universal sewerage to go with our universal suffrage. Many of us are also aware of the needs of people in the less rich countries we euphemistically call underdeveloped. These needs can only be satisfied through economic growth. The belief that economic growth is a good thing seems little more than common sense.
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I want therefore to answer the question 'Is economic growth a blessing or a curse?' by examining the arguments of those who oppose economic growth, and showing that they have no substance. There are three main lines of attack on economic growth.
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The first is the anti-materialism of some of the young people in developed countries as exemplified by hippies, and also by some others who would consider themselves radical reformers of the new left rather than drop outs. This rejection of affluence and of materialistic values is mainly confined to the children of affluent families who have always had material comfort and who have become bored with it. It is most evident in the U.S.A., the richest country in the world, and even there is most prevalent among children of the families who are better off economically. Such people have, of course, every right to reject materialism and material comforts for themselves. But surely it is arrogant in the extreme for them to reject it for others, many of whom have never known respectable comfort let alone affluence.
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The second group attacking economic growth are a small number of economists led by Professor E. J. Mishan whose views have been very trenchantly set out in his book <i>The Costs o f Economic Growth</i>. Mishan's arguments against growth can be summed up in three statements: (1) Western societies already have enough material things, (2) growth leads to large scale external diseconomies (I'll explain that piece of jargon shortly) and (3) growth leads to rapid obsolescence of knowledge as well as machinery and equipment, and the change accompanying it leads to the collapse of traditional values and growth of dissatisfaction with the status quo.
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Mishan's first point might have some validity if the world only contained the rich industrialised nations. Even in these nations there are still numbers of people living in poverty, but Mishan would argue that this should be cured by taking wealth and income from the rich and giving it to the poor. However it is much easier for the better off to give up part of their growth in income to help those not so well off, than it is for them to accept an absolute cut in the living standards to which they have become accustomed. This argument for continued growth has even more force when one remembers that Western nations share this planet with under-developed countries. It can be hoped that the Western nations will give more and more of their resources to help development in underdeveloped countries. They are more likely to do this if they are giving a part of the increase in their income, than if increasing aid to underdeveloped countries requires a cut in their own standard of living.
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Mishan's second point has some validity. To explain this it is necessary to explain what economists mean by external diseconomies. The essence of the idea is simple: if something I do causes a cost to others over and above the cost to me that is an external diseconomy. The pollution and congestion caused by cars are good examples of external diseconomies. Mishan especially hates the motor car -- He calls 'the invention of the private automobile . . . one of the great disasters to have befallen the human race'. It is true that in the past, economic growth has often been accompanied by disregard of the costs imposed on others by a whole host of things -- from smokey factory chimneys to the noise of jet aircraft. This is not an argument against economic growth, though it may be an argument in favour of discouraging certain forms of production or consumption. It is an argument in favour of making those who cause external diseconomies bear the cost of them, for example making all potential polluters bear the cost of preventing pollution or keeping it down to an acceptable level.
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Mishan's third point, that growth leads to a disrespect for traditional values, has a lot of truth in it. In most societies the fairly rapid change that often accompanies economic growth does lead to a questioning of traditional values and the status quo. How much you are disturbed by measures which increase dissatisfaction with the status quo depends on how much you love the status quo.
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Overall, I cannot help but be left with the unfortunate impression that a lot of Mishan's arguments amount to little more than saying that, with economic growth, many people can enjoy things previously only enjoyed by a select few, and that this greatly diminishes the welfare of those who were the select few previously enjoying these things. For example, his tirade against the tourist industry concludes with the words 'the annual invasion of tourists has transformed once-famous resorts ... into so many vulgar, Coney Islands'.
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The third type of attack on economic growth has come from the ecologists and conservationists. The most famous example is the study entitled <i>Limits to Growth</i> undertaken by Meadows and others for the Club of Rome. There are two separate issues in what the conservationists are saying. One is the pollution problem and the other the conservation of non-renewable natural resources. I've already said that the proper response to pollution is to make the polluters pay the full costs of removing or preventing the pollution. One must add to this the further point that there may well be some activities that should be banned altogether -- e.g. the discharge of mercury wastes into the sea.
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The other barrel of the ecologists' shotgun is that even if we stop polluting, we must still stop growing because otherwise we will exhaust the non-renewable natural resources of this world, perhaps in fifty years, perhaps in a hundred years but certainly sometime. This argument has two parts. One is that if population continues to grow at its present rate the population of the world will double every thirty years and soon there will be standing room only on space ship earth. The mathematics of these projections are unimpeachable, but population is unlikely to continue to grow at its present rate, particularly if we have economic growth. World population growth is dominated by the growth in the population of a small number of large underdeveloped countries, where population is growing very rapidly because the deathrate has fallen much more rapidly than the birthrate. The surest way of reducing the birthrate in these countries is by economic growth. To argue, as some ecologists have, that aid to underdeveloped countries will only give them a higher rate of population growth and make matters worse, is to fly in the face of this fact.
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On the other hand it is true that in many underdeveloped countries, reducing the rate of population growth is very important if efforts to improve the standard of living are to have much chance of success. For the world as a whole it is true that the sooner the rate of population growth is drastically reduced the greater the chance of eliminating much of the poverty throughout the world.
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The second part of the argument, by some ecologists, that achieving zero population growth will be fruitless, because it will merely postpone the doomsday when we run out of natural resources, is pessimism gone mad. If we can achieve zero population growth in the next seventy-five years and greatly reduce the rate of population growth almost immediately (as the largest country in the world, China, already appears to have done) the doomsday when we deplete this earth's resources will be pushed further into the future, giving us more time to change and adapt our patterns of production and consumption. Consumption patterns will change in any case with economic growth -- as communities become richer they spend more and more on services rather than goods. Productive patterns will also change automatically since if certain resources appear to be likely to be scarce in the foreseeable future their prices will rise -- encouraging both economy in their use and a search for substitutes. Consumption patterns and technology will both have to change greatly over the next 150 years. It seems hysterical to denounce economic growth because of a fear or assumption that change will not take place.
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In conclusion I think that all the arguments against economic growth in the sense of growth in output and income per head, are mistaken. They are also extremely dangerous. In as much as they lead more countries to adopt measures to deal with external diseconomies they will do some good, but the danger is that they will distract the nations of the world from doing anything about the real world crisis in our midst -- the disparity in living standards between the developed and undeveloped nations -- between Australia and Indonesia to give but one example. The arguments of the doomsday men are particularly dangerous as they may lead to a fatalistic feeling that if everything is going to end in disaster it is not worth trying to improve living standards in underdeveloped countries or among the under privileged in rich countries. The world does face a crisis lying in the difference in living standards between rich and poor nations. Economic growth, as properly understood, holds the only solution.
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<i>Postscript</i>
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Because the above was constrained by the absolute limits imposed by a thirteen and a half minute radio talk many points were omitted or touched on only very briefly. Letters that I received after the broadcast showed that this led to some misunderstanding of my general position. Let me therefore add the following five points by way of a postscript.
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(1) I do not advocate maximum economic growth as a goal of national policy. Like all economic goods economic growth has costs about which I said very little in my talk. One not insignificant cost is the consumption which must be foregone now to make possible the capital accumulation that is part of economic growth. I am not arguing that we should maximise economic growth. I am arguing that the benefits of economic growth at an appropriate rate far outweigh the costs. I have not considered at all the thorny question of what is the optimum rate of economic growth, except to assert, very strongly, that it is significantly greater than zero.
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(2) I am well aware that growth in gross national product, as conventionally measured, is a faulty indicator of economic growth. Not only are various goods, such as the services of housewives not measured in gross national product, but many costs, e.g. many pollution costs, which should be subtracted from gross output to get net production also escape measurement. It is of course genuine economic growth, not growth in the imperfect statistical indicator called gross national product, with which I am concerned.
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(3) My talk was concerned with per capita economic growth in total and not with the composition of output. I too would like to see more emphasis on many of the types of goods and services desired by many 'no growth' advocates; for example, I would like to see more of our growth in output devoted to preserving bushland in national parks, to better health services and to better education at all levels, and none to increasing the number of cars per head of population or introducing colour television. This point can be enlarged and strengthened. I indicated in the talk that there will have to be big changes in production and consumption patterns over the next fifty years. To some extent these will happen without any extra market pressures, as certain goods become more expensive due to increases in the relative scarcity of some resources. I see no reason why changes in consumption patterns should not be speeded up; not by government fiat but by forbidding things such as advertising campaigns which at present bias consumers' desires in the direction of more, bigger, and perhaps better material possessions.
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(4) The distribution of gross national product is at least equally important, in terms of human welfare, as its total. If economic growth occurs only by the rich getting richer, with no improvement in the lot of the poor I would not consider it worthwhile. This maxim can be applied to the distribution of gross national product between countries as well as to its distribution between people in one country.
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(5) Finally I am not one of those "madmen or economists" who think that exponential growth can go on for ever. However, I do believe that if zero population growth is achieved relatively quickly, growth in output per head for the world as a whole can continue at the present rate, or even slightly higher rates, for another 150 or 200 years. There will be immense problems in changing to a no growth world. It does not seem unreasonable to postpone consideration of these until a no growth world is only 100 years ahead, and to concentrate now on the equally immense and equally important problems facing the world in this century.
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<i>This paper was originally delivered as a 'Guest of Honour' broadcast on A.B.C. Radio</i>
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-46958377385707979222006-07-26T23:11:00.000+10:002008-02-26T23:11:56.870+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 16 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
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The first section of this chapter originally appeared as an article in <i>Nation Review</i>, 15 June 1973, p. 1074.
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<b><font size="5"> Is Inflation Inevitable? </font></b>
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John Ray
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<b>Who benefits?</b>
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ALL THE FURORE about inflation ignores one vital thing; governments are the major beneficiary. For Mr Whitlam and his ilk, inflation is a godsend.
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Increasingly, commentators are saying: 'Why worry about inflation? Wages, social service payments and other sources of income do rise at roughly the same rate as prices, and have in fact kept slightly ahead of them in past years.' So why worry indeed? Only if prices rose, but wages didn't, might we have cause for worry.
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The answer is that it seems unlikely that what used to happen in the past will ever happen again. The inflation rates that we used to have (an average of about two per cent per year) affect us quite differently from those we have now (about fourteen per cent). To see this, we must understand how inflation benefits governments.
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The key to the matter is our progressive taxation scales. if both prices and our wages go up by fourteen per cent a year, we are not able to buy as much as we could to start with. This is because the higher wage puts us into a higher tax bracket. The wage we are getting buys us no more than it did before, but because it seems to be a higher wage, the government takes away a bigger proportion of it.
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We can now see just how Mr Whitlam was able to promise so blandly that Labor would not increase our tax rates. He knew that inflation would do the job for him. With inflation, we automatically pay the government a higher proportion of our wages in tax. The more prices rise, the more cause our government has to be secretly pleased.
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Mr Snedden, by contrast, must be given great credit for the fact that he was the first treasurer we have had for a long time who did actually succeed in reducing inflation. Under Menzies, inflation used to run at about two per cent. Under McMahon, it grew to as high as six per cent. Snedden brought it back to four and a half per cent. Under Whitlam it is fourteen per cent at the time of writing.
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<b>Is Inflation Inevitable?</b>
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Under Whitlam, then, the workers must lose. If their productivity rises at about three per cent per year, this cannot compensate them for the extra large bite the tax man keeps taking out of their salaries and wages. Under Menzies, the rate of inflation was tiny and the extra amount the tax man took each year was accordingly tiny also. Productivity increases could easily exceed it and allow the average man to improve his standard of living.
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Under Whitlam, the inflation rate is too great to allow this to happen. Productivity is very hard to increase, but inflation can shoot up practically without limit.
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'But don't the prices justification tribunals and all the other attacks the state and federal Labor governments are making on prices show that they are trying to hold down inflation?', someone might ask. The answer is that all these measures show is that Labor is trying to have its cake and eat it too. Labor wants wages to go up by huge amounts, but have prices remain stable.
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Where do they think the money to pay the higher wages is going to come from? How can the manufacturer pay the higher wages if he doesn't get higher prices? Enough businesses fail as it is. Do we want them all to fail at once?
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No, I am sure that Mr Whitlam, Mr Cameron and all the other Labor ministers are intelligent enough to see that demands for wage increases which exceed productivity increases are an exercise in futility. The community cannot have more goods and services unless it produces more goods and services. If wages go up ten per cent, but prices go up seven per cent you have still only got your three per cent productivity increase anyhow, so why not just ask for three per cent to start with?
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The answer is of course that the worker has got no guarantee that others will do the same. He has to look to his government to set the pace and enforce moderation all round. This Labor will not do.
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Why not? Because inflation is what they want. Labor must have inflation or else it will not be able to raise all the extra tax revenue it needs to pay its vastly increased army of public servants.
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So next time Mr Cameron or any other Labor spokesman is advocating great new handouts for the workers we must realise that he is really advocating that the workers give him a handout in the form of increased tax. Any increase the workers do get will be more than eaten up by the combination of higher prices and higher tax. Only if he announces that the tax rates will be reduced by whatever the inflation rate turns out to be should he be taken seriously. He is dishonest unless he does.
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Governments cannot easily control prices and wages. Taxes they can. If Labor is sincere in wanting to help the working man, it will prevent his taxes from rising. Unless this is done there will be great unrest. We are used to rising standards of living. Australians will not tolerate governments grabbing all of the increase in wealth that we produce each year.
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<b>Socialism</b>
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To socialists increased public control of the nation's spending power is what life is all about. This is a matter for debate in its own right. Conservatives argue that government activity is intrinsically bureaucratic and inefficient, and is hence to be minimised. Socialists, on the other hand feel unsafe in a threatening world unless they have centralised all power into their own fumbling hands. The outcome of this debate is not the point here. The point is that the issue should be debated rather than having the measures favoured by one side being introduced by stealth. And that is what inflation does. Via the progressive income tax scales, it transfers a larger and larger proportion of the nation's income into government hands. It automatically decides the debate in favour of the socialists.
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In Australia, this increased government share of the wealth was obtained by the socialists not only by stealth, but also under the cloak of outright lies. In his 1972 election speech, Mr Whitlam, the Labor leader, promised that there would be no increase in income taxes under his government. It was under this promise that he was elected to power. He uses the flimsy excuse that he has not increased the tax rates to claim that he has not broken his word. He omits to mention that by causing everybody to move into a higher bracket it is just the same as if he had increased the rates.
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The very fact that Mr Whitlam had to resort to such a shabby lie is some indication that, if given the choice, the people would not want the socialist program of bigger and bigger government. He was elected to ensure that government would not grab more and more of the wealth. One wonders where his supposedly tender morals and high principles are, when he stealthily does the opposite.
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<b>What is inflation?</b>
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'But inflation is a worldwide problem. You cannot blame just one government for it! How do you know that Australia's Labor government deliberately set out to cause inflation?' To answer the latter question first: if you saw someone pouring petrol on a fire, which would be more likely-that he wanted to encourage the fire or put it out? Inflation is like a constantly smouldering fire. It is always there even if there is very little of it and a government must always be vigilant to hold it down. It certainly must not do anything to encourage it. Labor, however, has turned all its wits to the task of encouraging it.
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The very word 'inflation' indicates the cause of the problem. What is being inflated is the money supply. If you issue too much money it is worth less. Prices rise. All weak governments of whatever political colour tend to do this. Because governments alone have the power to print money they must be vigilant not to abuse that power. A strong government will only issue as much money as is needed to keep the nation's business activity and productivity running at full capacity. If they want to spend more money themselves they will not just print some. They will take as much as they need back from the people in tax. If they just kept printing it, it would be like a huge gang of counterfeiters broken loose. Soon there would be so much of it around it would be worthless. A weak government, however, is too afraid to ask the people for more money in taxes. At the same time, it also finds it hard to say 'no' to many of the demands that are made on it.
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In the modern world, everybody wants a handout. Everybody can think of something extra that they would like the government to do for them. The 'do-gooders' want handouts for Aborigines and pensioners to salve their own aching, but affluent consciences, the farmers want handouts for all sorts of rural subsidies, the businessmen want handouts in the form of tax exemptions and tariff protection and middle class intellectuals want more child-minding centres so they will not have to look after their own infants. Any government has to be very good at saying 'no'. The whole country would have to work an eighty hour week to carry out even a fraction of the tasks that individual people think the government should undertake. A weak government, however, not only finds it hard to say 'no', but also finds it hard to raise the taxes to pay for those things to which it says 'yes'. Issuing more money -- inflation -- is the only way out.
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So the answer so far to the question posed in the title to this chapter would appear to be 'yes'; as long as a majority of the people will vote for a government that promises them something for nothing, inflation is inevitable.
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<b>Who is to blame?</b>
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The Australian Labor government is not alone in promising the people something for nothing. Its predecessor, the McMahon 'Liberal' government was also in a very weak position prior to the 1972 election and they too had started down the slippery road of inflation. If the Labor government had been a responsible one, therefore, what it should have done when it came into office was at least to have kept spending down to its then current levels. Instead, it increased its spending enormously and added fuel to the inflationary flames. It turned a flame into a blaze. In less than a year inflation rose from four to fourteen per cent.
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Note, however, that this sort of inflation is only caused by continually increasing government spending. If a new government simply increases spending to a new higher level and thereafter maintains that level without further increases, inflation should slacken off. This could just possibly happen in Australia. It takes up to a year for changes in government spending policies to have their full effect on the economy and much of the fourteen per cent inflation that occurred under Labor was in fact traceable to excess spending initiated under the previous government. Had a conservative government been re-elected, however, this rate would have represented a peak from which there would have been a rapid fall. In this case, the effect of electing a Labor government rather than a conservative one might simply have been that high rates of inflation were maintained for a longer period. The effects of inflation are, however, permanent. If you have fourteen per cent inflation in one year and none in the next, it still means that your money has permanently lost fourteen per cent of its value. If you have fourteen per cent inflation for two years running, it means your money has permanently lost nearly twenty-eight per cent of its old value. High rates of inflation for long periods are much more damaging than high rates of inflation for short periods.
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The fact that inflation is worldwide is no apology for inflation in any particular country. Weak governments are quite common so inflation will be quite common. Talk of the presence or absence of inflation in other countries is, however, quite vacant. Because its presence is so universal, what matters is not its presence or absence, but its rate. Americans seem to be more enraged by inflation than are Australians, but in fact their rate of inflation at around seven per cent is only half Australia's at the time of writing. Under the Allende government in Chile -- which never had much more than a third of the vote and was so weak and disastrously mismanaged as to provoke a most reluctant military takeover -- inflation was running at over 300 per cent. The difference between two per cent and 300 per cent inflation may well be the difference between orderly democratic process and social disruption leading to violent authoritarian revolution.
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<b>Who suffers?</b>
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This brings us back to the question of who actually does suffer because of inflation. We are not very likely to have a revolution here in Australia (though the Chileans once thought that too) so what is the problem? The answer is that although people's rage at their money's losing its value might be less under our inflation than under Chile's, it is still often very clearly felt. This answer also shows who is worse hit: people with savings. More accurately, little people with savings. People who have a lot of money have it invested where inflation cannot hurt it (in real estate etc ) , but Joe the worker, the poor 'mug' who carries the country on his back, is the one who loses. He tries to save for a house, a trip, his old age or some little luxuries, but the longer he leaves it in the bank the less it is worth. It gets to the point where the thing he is saving for increases its price faster than he is putting money by. Even though he is saving, he is getting further away from being able to buy it rather than nearer.
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Not only is this totally unjust, it is economically disastrous. It discourages saving. With reduced savings, banks would have less money to lend out; and with less money to be borrowed, businessmen would not be as able to invest in the plant, buildings, machinery and equipment needed to provide the workers with more and better jobs. Improvement in living standards could not only grind to a halt but actually give way to a decline. If we were totally without savings, we would be back in the caveman era within a couple of generations. To improve the standard of living, every government must encourage savings for all it is worth. Handout-loving governments discourage it.
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<b>Nationalisation?</b>
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Even a government takeover of all businesses would be no solution here. Quite apart from the inefficiency and waste such moves tend to engender, if a government was so weak as to have to resort to inflation in a last-ditch attempt to stay in office, it would scarcely be strong enough to take a step as radical as complete nationalisation. Not that nationalisation is any substitute for savings. Only if nationalisation was accompanied by much higher taxes and rationing to substitute for voluntary saving (as in Soviet Russia) could it lead to increased productivity. It is no secret that such a state has never been freely and voluntarily chosen by the majority of the population of any nation anywhere. Even Allende's electoral victory in Chile came about only because of the absence of preferential voting. The conservative vote was split down the middle between two candidates and a solid Leftist vote for Allende gave him the victory with little more than one third of the total vote. Right up to the end of democracy in Chile, the Chilean congress had a solid conservative majority.
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<b>Needy people</b>
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Another group that suffers from inflation are those who are not well organised to agitate for income justice. Pensioners and people (often widows) living off a private income from stocks and shares would perhaps be good examples here. While these people do eventually get increases in their income to compensate for inflation, such increases are often much delayed and seldom do more than allow for inflation that has already occurred. Strongly unionised workers, by contrast, can also get increases to compensate for anticipated inflation. The upshot is that the average income of poorly organised groups may in fact tend to be much less than it is supposed to be. They will chronically be in a 'fallen behind' state.
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<b>Subjective welfare</b>
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Another thing to consider is the loss of subjective welfare. While not easily amenable to exact economic analysis, it can make or break governments via the ballot box so it must be regarded as of no small importance. There is little doubt that the transfer of spending power to the government must reduce subjective economic welfare below what it would otherwise be. That was one lesson that was forced very clearly on the welfare state governments of Scandinavia during 1973. The fact that inflation transfers spending power to the government, should not necessarily reduce total national welfare if the money acquired is used by the government for socially enjoyed works such as better roads, more schools etc. The people still enjoy the fruits of their labour, but in a collective rather than in a private way. The snag here, however, is that such reasoning requires an assumption that a dollar spent (or enjoyed) collectively gives as much satisfaction as a dollar spent privately. This assumption is most certainly false. J. K. Galbraith in his book <i>The Affluent Society</i> documents very well the apparent idiocy of private affluence and public poverty. What is the good of a big shiny new car replete with gadgets if the road you have to drive it on is little more than a bush track with tar on it? This is surely an example -- an all too familiar example -- of a great disparity between the level of affluence in publicly and privately consumed goods. With a good economist's suspicion of the subjective, Galbraith documents this phenomenon and inveighs against it, but he utterly fails to make any attempt at understanding it or incorporating it in his economics. The acknowledged or apparent utility of a good is often only a small part of its total utility. Exclusiveness to any degree is something highly valued by many people. The adjective 'exclusive' would not be so overworked by advertisers were it not so. Public goods, however, cannot by definition have any exclusiveness. They are therefore less attractive. A man may enjoy a small private backyard lawn more than a large public park simply because it is private and no-one can disturb him there without his prior permission.
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Exclusiveness is of course only one aspect of why a dollar spent on private goods is more satisfying than a dollar spent for you on public goods. Prestige, competitiveness and impersonality are other factors that would be needed in a complete understanding of the phenomenon. Given that that is the way things are, inflation must lead to a reduction in subjective economic satisfaction wherever fixed and progressive tax rates apply. This must surely be of concern to anyone but the convinced Fascist who thinks that the things people want are of no concern. Note that this subjective loss from inflation applies to all of the population --not just some sectors of it.
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<b>Strikes</b>
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Of all the evils brought about by inflation perhaps the most cankerous is increased industrial unrest. It is a sorry but true statement that wage rises in Australia are often extorted by strikes, bans and other forms of industrial disruption. With a high rate of inflation any wage rise that is secured by any means becomes more rapidly eroded in its purchasing power. This means that if its purchasing power is to be maintained, wage rises must be secured more frequently. If wage rises are obtained by way of industrial action, however, this means that industrial action must be taken more frequently. Quite aside from the increased community disruption and resentment that this causes, it means that a greater part of the working year is lost and total production must decline. The combination of an expanding money supply and a shrinking supply of goods means that inflation becomes even more severe than it would otherwise have been. The whole community suffers a real and irretrievable loss. Lost working days can never be had over again. They and the goods they would have produced are gone forever.
<br><br>
It should by now be very clear why people who dismiss inflation as not really much of an evil are the most wishful of wishful thinkers. It is probably the greatest ill that the economist has yet to find a cure for. Because the cure most certainly involves subjective and sociological factors that the economist either cannot or will not deal with, we can be sure that it will be a long time before any generally accepted solution to the problem emerges. For a start, a means would have to be devised whereby weak governments could not use inflation as a backdoor way of increasing their spending. Something like the U.S. Federal Reserve Board might do the trick, but it would have to be given authority to set limits to total government expenditure as well as controlling monetary policy.
<br><br>
<b>Cost push</b>
<br><br>
This alone would only solve half of the problem. While weak government is the inflationary cause heavily concentrated on in this paper so far, it is not the only one. In economists' terms, what has been concentrated on is the most usual form of 'demand pull' inflation. As well as this there is 'cost push' inflation and certain other varieties of demand pull inflation that even strong and economically responsible democratic governments can do little about. Several Fascist governments, however, appear to have succeeded in overcoming them. The main ones among these several causes of inflation are: attempts to push incomes ahead of productivity, attempts to alter relativities between incomes, changes in the velocity of circulation of money, fluctuations in rural incomes, fluctuations in consumer spending, fluctuations in investment spending, declining standards of living and 'imported' inflation. In discussing each of these, problems below, some possible solutions will be suggested.
<br><br>
Perhaps the least important are changes in the velocity of circulation of money. Great though these changes may be over long periods, in any one year their effect is so slight as to be quite swamped in the other inflationary processes. All that is required to deal with inflation from this source would be fractionally more restrained expenditure policies.
<br><br>
Fluctuations in rural incomes are much more of a problem for Australia than for most other developed countries. At the time of writing they are a considerable element in the league of inflationary forces. Prices for Australia's wool, wheat and meat are all simultaneously at near record levels. This means, expressed in lay terms, that the Reserve Bank is issuing record amounts of Australian dollars to graziers and farmers in exchange for the huge amounts of American dollars they (or, more strictly, their agents) are bringing from overseas. An upwards revaluation of our currency could reduce this effect and this has already been largely done, but to do so is quite clearly unfair to the farmers. The farmers have had a long run of bad seasons and low prices and this is the first chance they have had to start paying off their debts. To revalue is to rob them of that opportunity and return them to their familiar role of beggars on the state. A far more equitable solution to the problem would be an increase in the deposits ( SRDs ) that trading banks are required to make with the Reserve Bank. This would soak up the extra cash as soon as it is issued.
<br><br>
A very fashionable cry at the moment concerns the spectre of 'imported inflation'. This refers to the higher prices overseas of many things that Australia imports. Again this is only reflected by higher prices for those same goods in Australia if Australia's exchange rates remain steady. Therefore a revaluation of our currency in an amount just sufficient to allow for overseas inflation is the appropriate step here. In Australia at the time of writing such steps would appear to have been taken already.
<br><br>
Closely related to the phenomenon of imported inflation is inflation due to falling standards of living. This has been relatively unusual in the world so far, but that may not last indefinitely. It can be best understood by considering what would happen to the value of your money after a nuclear war. It would obviously buy less (if anything). This would be because many of the things (and people) going to make up our previous standard of living would have gone. Although we would be poorer in real terms, the amount of money we had might not have changed. This would be another variety of inflation. The most likely cause of such inflation in the near future is an Arab oil embargo. Such an unplanned-for event might mean that many industries would have to reduce production below that of previous years. There would therefore be less for one's money to buy. The best measure to deal with this would be to increase taxes to sop up the excess spending-power and use the proceeds on government sponsored research and development projects designed to overcome the energy (oil) deficit.
<br><br>
Fluctuations in investment spending have a now (since Keynes) well-known role in the cycle of economic activity. The Keynesian prescription of complementary governmental expenditure patterns is one of the solutions that would work in allowing for such phenomena. Other alternatives are indicative planning on the highly successful French model, or perhaps sheer Friedmanite optimism about their minor disruptive role under a stable money supply regime.
<br><br>
Fluctuations in aggregate consumer spending are a cause of the inflation that Australia is experiencing currently. In theory they are not supposed to happen, but as a response to existing inflation they are eminently understandable. If money seems to be going out of fashion, it makes sense to buy something with it while it still has its value. The result is an upsurge in consumer demand which exceeds the available supply and encourages businessmen to profit-taking via higher prices. It is a vicious circle phenomenon whereby inflation generates more inflation. As a secondary phenomenon, its solution lies in solving the other inflationary influences being described in this chapter.
<br><br>
<b>Monopolies</b>
<br><br>
By far the most important cause of inflation in the modern world is the one I have left for last: monopoly activity. We do not always suffer from weak government, but we always suffer from monopoly activity. Under the term 'monopoly', must of course be included the labour monopolies represented by the various trade unions. In the modern world, trade unions are the most overt, vicious and unassailable of all monopolies.
<br><br>
The two main varieties of monopoly activity are attempts to push incomes ahead of productivity, and attempts to alter relativities between incomes. In practice the two go together with the latter being used to cloak the logical futility of the former. The worker wants to be paid more than his production is worth and cloaks the overall impossibility by saying that he is going to do it by taking away part of 'the boss's' share. The cake is only so big, so if you want more of the national cake you have got to take it from someone else. Labour monopolies are not alone in attempting this, but they are the most obtrusive. There is no point in arguing who is most successful at it or who started it. On both sides the action is equal folly and is equally unsuccessful. In spite of fluctuations from year to year, there has been no consistent change in the share of the national cake going to either side for over a century. In both Australia and the U.S.A. roughly two thirds of the national income goes to labour and that is that. A hundred years of strikes and union activity has not altered the basic pattern. (If this seems a surprising assertion, it can be checked in any basic economics textbook.)
<br><br>
But how does such activity lead to inflation? It leads to inflation by the well-known route of higher wages being agreed to which can only be paid by the employer charging higher prices. Higher prices would in turn lead to declining business turnover were the money supply held fixed and this in turn would lead to unemployment, so the government feels obliged to issue more money in order to prevent any unemployment. Thus, for the best of motives on the government's part, the currency is inflated again. The only way it can be prevented is if the only wage rises granted are those that business can afford without raising prices and without going broke. Such rises would be small and hence psychologically unacceptable to the unions. Even if their members are getting richer at only two per cent per year, the position of the officials of the union makes it important that the members look as if they are getting richer faster than that.
<br><br>
<b>Wealth</b>
<br><br>
Since the above is probably a little difficult to follow for the economically unsophisticated, some elaboration of the basic axioms involved seems appropriate at this point. The basic axiom is that wealth is goods and services, not money. You can have a bale of money as big as a haystack but if no one wants to accept it in exchange for goods and services you are a pauper and could in fact starve to death. The wealth of a country consists then not in the amount of gold or money that it has, but rather in the amount of goods and services it produces. It is this wealth that was metaphorically described above as 'the national cake'. The only way for everybody in the nation to get richer is to expand production, and this is usually done by giving the workers better machines to work with. It is done, in other words, by capital investment undertaken by businessmen. The day when it is done by the workers working harder does not exactly seem to be upon us. Thus, because of the quite selfishly motivated activities of businessmen, the whole nation experiences steady rises in its standard of living -- in Australia at about the rate of two per cent per annum. Therefore, if anybody is getting richer at more than two per cent per annum he is doing so at the expense of someone else. Individuals may do this of course by such means as winning the lottery, getting for themselves more specifically career oriented education, by real estate speculation and a whole host of other means. Since they are individuals the effect of their so doing on the whole economy (on the incomes of the rest of us) is too small to be noticed. Paul Getty (said to be the richest man in the world and probably worth approximately $1,000 million) made this point well to a visiting agitator who told him that he should divide up his fortune and give equal shares of it to the workers. Getty then had his accountants do some sums and said to the agitator: 'O.K., well at least I can give you your share of my fortune' -- and handed the agitator 14c. However, what is true for individuals is not true for whole sectors of the economy such as the members of a trade union. If all the members of the metalworkers union get a twenty per cent rise, it will be at the expense of reducing what the wages of all the rest of us will buy. The prices of metal goods will rise and we will be able to afford fewer of them. That the members of the metalworkers became richer will have made us poorer-poorer not in the money we get, but in what the money will buy (what economists call poorer 'in real terms'). No one will of course tolerate just one sector, such at the metalworkers, getting richer at their expense. Everybody will want similar treatment. So everybody will put in for the same rise and everything produced in the economy will have its price raised and everybody will be right back where they started -- including the metalworkers. The whole thing will have been an exercise in futility that made no one richer in real terms, but simply produced inflation (of around twenty per cent). Savers and people on fixed incomes will have been penalised and all the other ill effects of inflation (in this case 'cost push' inflation) will ensue. Logically, the only wage rises that a union can get for its members is whatever rise would cover any increases in production they have accomplished. If productivity has increased two per cent and they get a wage rise of twenty per cent, they will still end up with only a two per cent rise in real terms (purchasing power). The other eighteen per cent will simply be inflation. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the logical thing to do is to settle for two per cent in the first place.
<br><br>
How can cost push inflation such as that described above be solved? How can unions and other monopolies be persuaded to accept only such rises in income as they have produced? The answer is not a simple matter of just one measure. Rather it is a multi-pronged attack on the problem which is required. A concerted anti-monopoly policy has to be implemented. To deal with the labour monopolies first:
<br><br>
<b>Policy towards labour</b>
<br><br>
The first measure required is restoration of automatic quarterly cost of living adjustments to all salaries and wages. This few people seem now to dispute. Certainly the unions themselves are strongly behind it. This would eliminate any need for strikes to recover lost purchasing power of wages. Eliminating strikes would mean more production and more production would mean reduced supply, as a cause of inflation, would be eliminated. Quarterly cost of living adjustments based on the Commonwealth Statistician's Consumer Price Index were once attacked as inflationary in themselves, but to do so overlooks the fact that compensation for inflation will be gained by the workers in the long run regardless, therefore they might as well be given it without the need for them to resort to economic disruption.
<br><br>
<b>Productivity</b>
<br><br>
The next step would be the relatively unprecedented one of also making automatic adjustments for increases in productivity. These would ideally be annual and uniform nationwide. If the Net National Product (or some other suitable aggregate) increased by three per cent in real terms during the year, a two per cent rise should be automatically given to all workers at the beginning of the succeeding financial year.
<br><br>
Why two and not three per cent? Because the gross increase in productivity would have to have subtracted from it that share which goes to capital. If the workers consistently get only two thirds of the national income they should also get only two thirds of any increase in that income. To do otherwise would only introduce disequilibrium and distortions.
<br><br>
Why should these increases be uniform nationwide? What if one industry increases its productivity twenty per cent. Should they not get more than just a two per cent increase? This is a fairly difficult question, but the reason for the nationwide basis is that it is really the nation as a whole which makes any increase possible. One thing for sure is that any increase is most unlikely to stem from the workers working harder. It will usually stem from investment in better machines or introduction of superior work methods by management. Increases such as this are then not the property of the workers who happen to be working there when such improvements are introduced. Nor are such increases the property of the management. The managers and the owners of the business are highly unlikely to be the ones who thought of the new idea or invented the new machine. The whole question of the ownership of productivity increases is irredeemably complicated. To say that they belong to the nation as a whole and hence to all of us equally, is probably as near as we can get to the truth, and if not, it is certainly likely to be the most generally acceptable practical compromise.
<br><br>
A case with a little difference is where productivity increases are brought about by the introduction of incentive schemes and the like. In this instance, it is the workers working harder that accounts for the increase. Such schemes do have their own inbuilt reward for productivity so further allowance for it on the national level is not required. A national rise in wages due to productivity of, say two per cent, however, would have to be applied to piecework rates as well as to other forms of wages.
<br><br>
Once annual productivity adjustments were introduced, unions would be deprived of one more reason for striking and again the supply aspect of the inflation equation would be improved. In fact, the only remaining reason they could give for agitation is the well-known concern over 'relativities'.
<br><br>
<b>Relativities</b>
<br><br>
'Relativities' refer to the differences between the wages paid for doing different sorts of jobs. If at one time university lecturers are getting an average of $8,000 per year and schoolteachers are getting an average of $5,000 the relativities between the two are obviously eight to five. If then the lecturers get a rise that brings them up to $10,000 then the relativities have been disturbed (from eight to five to ten to five) and some very angry muttering will be heard from schoolteachers.
<br><br>
Schoolteachers will then consider themselves entitled to a rise of, say, another $1,000 or thereabouts 'to restore relativities'. What can be done about this? Does anything need to be done about it?
<br><br>
The one time when something definitely would need to be done by the government about relativities would be at the time the above two annual adjustments (cost of living and productivity) were introduced. At the time such adjustments were introduced, the government would want to say something such as: 'In future you will get all the wage rises you can possible get automatically. Agitation for more will in future be just plain disruptiveness or selfishness. Anybody who does so will be opposed and resisted by all the authority that the state can command.' If, before this was said, relativities had not been taken care of, many unions would quite reasonably protest: 'You ask us to stop all agitation for more wages, but if we do we will be locked into a permanently disadvantaged position. Two years ago, our members got thirty per cent more than a day labourer, but now they only get fifteen per cent more. We were just about to make a claim to restore the relativities, but if you now will not let us we will never be able to get justice.' And so the lines would be drawn with the government cast in the role of unreasonable autocracy. The resulting showdown could wreck the whole scheme.
<br><br>
<b>A non-monetary relativities index</b>
<br><br>
What would need to be done would be to draw up a non-monetary relativities index. At present relativities are normally negotiated in terms of dollars and the issue of relativities gets confused with other issues such as cost of living and productivity. There are, moreover, no inbuilt checks and balances. If somebody thinks his job is worth thirty per cent more than a day labourer's, the day labourers will not come into the discussion and argue with him. They will in fact hope that he can win his argument and get thirty per cent more. Then they can come forward and claim that relativities have been violated and that the other man's job is only worth twenty per cent more than theirs. So then they will get a wage rise too and the whole thing will go on as a vicious and inflationary circle.
<br><br>
With a non-monetary index this could not happen. Such an index would be drawn up by taking the work of day labourers as a base of 100 units. Then the worth of all other jobs would be expressed in terms of a day labourer's work. If a teacher's work was decided to be worth 150 units, this would mean that his work was fifty per cent more valuable than a day labourer's. How would such relativities be decided? How would we check whether a teacher should in fact be rated as 150? By taking the average relativities to day labourers over the preceding fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long enough period for several cycles of approaching and receding relativities to have been passed through and the average should be the best estimate of what the actual relativities are. It would also be a short enough period not to be affected by real changes in relative work value. Once these initial values for relativities had been statistically established in terms of a common base, they would be subject to further negotiation in the Commonwealth Industrial Court. The various unions would then have to oppose each other if they genuinely thought differently about their relativities, one to the other. The presiding judge or judges could then decide the case on the basis of having heard, in the one hearing, both sides of the case. Australia is in fact fortunate in already having a widely accepted court system for deciding such issues. Other countries wanting to establish a non-monetary relativities index would have to set up courts especially for deciding between competing claims.
<br><br>
Immediately before the introduction of the automatic adjustments outlined earlier, the non-monetary relativity index would have to be applied to all existing wages and all deviant wages adjusted so that the money relativities corresponded to the relativities of the non-monetary index. Since no government ever likes to order a reduction of wages, this might have to be done by upgrading all wages so that the wage most out of line with the index could stay put. This, however, would be a once-and-for-all inflation, not to be repeated, and done in lieu of allowing continuing inflation. If, with subsequent technological and social changes, the value of certain occupations should rise or fall and thus go out of line with the index, this could always be debated and decided in open court and appropriate adjustments to the index made.
<br><br>
What is advocated here is a three-pronged attack on cost push inflation; automatic cost of living adjustments, automatic productivity adjustments and a non-monetary relativities index. If all these three things were introduced, all objective justification for union wage demands would be removed. Any union going on strike to make demands for more money would not have a logical leg to stand on. In such circumstances, they would receive much less public support and sympathy than they do now and the government would be able to act more successfully against them. Cost push inflation would be largely defeated.
<br><br>
<b>The nature of economic power</b>
<br><br>
The underlying assumption of the above-outlined three-pronged attack on union-caused inflation can be expressed in the epigram 'power is plausibility'. Few people in a modern society can get away with defying their governments. Unionists are the major exception. The government does not have sufficient power over them. The power of the unions is too great relative to the government's power. To beat inflation and the social disruptions of strikes, the government must acquire more power relative to the unions. How can that be done? Only by demonstrating that the government is the most fair and the most reasonable.
<br><br>
In a democracy, power does not consist of guns; it is only backed up by guns. A democratic election is not the process of choosing the men best fit to govern. Were that the case, educational and intellectual qualifications could well be the final court of appeal. No, what a democratic election does is to choose those who are most plausible as a government -- those who seem to be the fairest and the most reasonable in what they propose to do. Even in a dictatorship, the leader must be plausible, if only to those on whose guns he relies. The three-pronged program I have outlined would give the government immense plausibility as an authority that has taken account of, and provided for, every possible reasonable demand that a union could raise. The union would be implausible and hence powerless. The officers would be unlikely to get the support of even their own rank and file.
<br><br>
Perhaps this picture is unduly optimistic. Selfishness on the part of some sections of the union movement may still be sufficient motivation to defy even the most plausible opponent. In this case reason is thrown out the window and it becomes a brute conflict of might: who can hurt the other most. In this instance, the government would have to arm itself with extra powers for the conflict such as are outlined in the next chapter. Existing wage setting procedures have succeeded only in producing inflation. The time for new government action has undeniably arrived.
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<b>Revolutionaries</b>
<br><br>
What do we do with the convinced revolutionary who thinks that all the provisions of the above vaunted three-pronged wages policy are still implausible because they simply perpetuate and help to work better a system that is itself intrinsically and basically unjust -- someone who thinks that the worker should get not two thirds of the national income, but all of it? Fortunately, such people are quite rare in this country, and therefore unlikely to form any substantial body of opposition to the policy proposed here. Some answer, nevertheless, must be given to their claims.
<br><br>
The basic point to be made can be put in the form of a question: 'Who digs the ditch-the worker or the shovel?' Obviously the worker would be in difficulty without the shovel and the shovel would be equally ineffective without the worker to wield it. If you are determined to be aggrieved you can, depending on your bias, make a case for saying either that all the credit should go to the worker or that all the credit should go to the shovel. But if we are going to be honest the credit should obviously be divided up between the two. This is precisely what any economic system does. The only variation is what share the system gives to the worker and what share the system gives to the providers of the tools. In Australia and the U.S.A. as we mentioned, the workers get two thirds of the national income. In other countries, such as the Soviet Union, they get much less. What the proportion is depends on how scarce the two factors (labour and capital) are and how much adding a bit more of either increases production. If labour is highly productive relative to capital, it gets more of the rewards. The proportion of the generated income that goes to labour and the proportion that goes to capital, entrepreneurship, etc., is in other words fixed naturally by the free interplay of market forces. The only way this can be upset is by introducing the all-pervasive monopoly of the totalitarian state. People who want that are beyond the reach of any argument that I could put up.
<br><br>
<b>A generational hypothesis</b>
<br><br>
One remaining point to be made about cost push inflation from the labour side, is to consider why it seems to have been on the upsurge throughout the world in recent years. What has happened to the two per cent inflation rates of the Menzies era? The answer does show how urgently government must revise its techniques for dealing with the unions.
<br><br>
Up until the end of the 'sixties', the majority of the workforce could remember the Great Depression. They remembered how valuable a job was and how eagerly work was once sought. They feared unemployment with a holy fear. If the government held the threat (or the reality) of unemployment over their head they would surrender in any confrontation. If they went on strike, they always saw in their mind's eye the unemployed throngs of men crowding at the factory gate ready and eager to take over their job. They were just plain grateful to have work. In their day governments could, and did, control inflation and union militancy simply by bringing on a 'squeeze'-a temporary rise in levels of unemployment. Inflation was inversely proportional to the level of unemployment -- the famous 'Phillips curve'.
<br><br>
Now, however, these men are no longer in the majority at union meetings. The post-war generation has grown up and for this generation the Depression is something vague they have heard about and which they simply see as yet another evidence of the stupidity and incompetence of their predecessors. For them, the world has always been devoid of any serious economic threats and they take material sufficiency as being just the natural order of things. It is certainly not something they have reason to fear will vanish overnight (as it did for the men of 1929). Even if they are thrown out of work, the hardships are only small and temporary. Unemployment is not a weapon that can be used to browbeat them. In the circumstances, why not demand even more in wages and conditions? What is there to lose?
<br><br>
The postwar generation is right. Governments have learnt a lot more about how to control economies. You seldom have any unemployment now unless governments deliberately create it. Certainly there is no fear of things getting so out of hand that we have a repeat performance of the Great Depression. Governments have learnt how to control unemployment. Now they have to learn how to control inflation. In so doing they will have to discard both the outdated ideologies of the Left and the inertia of the Right. No political ideology failing to adapt itself to the times can hope to survive.
<br><br>
This need for new government activity in the field of inflation is widely recognised and is generally referred to as a need for a 'prices and incomes policy'. Just what such a policy should consist of, however, is a matter of no agreement and even less imagination. The 'anti-monopoly' policy suggested in this paper is one proposal for what a prices and incomes policy should consist of.
<br><br>
<b>Business monopolies</b>
<br><br>
This leads us to the other side of an anti-monopoly policy: measures to deal with business monopolies. How many prongs does an attack on this sort of monopoly require? Curiously enough, a three pronged attack seems to be required here too. In summary, the three prongs are: tariff cuts, price control and restrictive trade practices legislation.
<br><br>
The first point to be made is that the most effective form of price control that there is is undoubtedly free competition. Anybody who thinks that bureaucratic control can keep prices down better than can competition should consider the case of Australian petrol prices. For over thirty years these were subject to bureaucratic control in the form of the South Australian Prices Commissioner. Every so often, the companies would come along and give full details of their costs and operations and where these costs had risen, the Commissioner would grant a rise in the price of petrol in proportion to the rise in costs. The Australian oil companies formed a cosy cartel (a form of monopoly) without a care in the world. They were happy and the consumer -- because he thought his interests were well guarded -- was happy also. Then along came competition in the form of Eric Sykes and his new and cheeky XL Petroleum Co. Petrol prices were slashed by up to ten cents a gallon wherever his service stations appeared. We would have waited forever for a bureaucracy to give us a twenty per cent cut in the price of petrol, but competition gave it to us almost instantly. And it did not cost us a penny for bureaucrats' salaries! It was not even a matter of the bureaucracy being dishonest or incompetent. It is just that a monopoly has little incentive for cost saving. If a monopolist thinks he needs a new office building he just builds it and passes the cost on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Thus, when the prices commissioner is told that costs have risen due to the need for new quarters, he checks up to see that the quarters are being used and that they did cost what they were claimed to cost and that is all he can reasonably do. The monopolist has suffered higher costs so in all justice he must be allowed to charge higher prices. Mr Sykes, by contrast, does without a lot of staff and works in quite modest accommodation. Because he is competing and trying to take business away from the big established companies, he has every incentive to cut costs to the bone and pass the saving on in the form of lower prices so he can attract more customers. Under competition, the selfishness of Mr Sykes (he is doing it all for his own good, not as an act of philanthropy) is enlisted to give us lower prices.
<br><br>
<b>Government protection of business monopolies</b>
<br><br>
XL Petroleum, then, sets the model for the best way to attack monopolistic prices. With the all-important exceptions of food, clothing and housing, much of the Australian economy is monopolised so there is plenty of room for improvement. One of the most obvious steps would be for the government to stop protecting monopolies. The previous Liberal government came very close to breaking Mr Sykes by insisting that he conform to regulations designed for companies quite different to his. In fact, only a rise in the international price of crude oil saved him from this attack. Monopolists are great providers of extravagant dinners for politicians and top bureaucrats. Perhaps forbidding attendance at such dinners would be one way of curbing pro-monopoly sentiment in our leaders. The government should have a positive policy of encouraging and facilitating competition -- even a department for it!
<br><br>
One particular way that governments could stop protecting monopolies, is by abolishing Customs Tariffs on all industries except those which are vital for defence. At the moment Australia even has tariffs for protecting the local plastic Christmas tree industry! The whole point of tariffs is to reduce competition from overseas. We need that competition if prices are to be minimised. Australian companies that are too inefficient to stand the pace should close. The consumer cannot be expected to go on subsidising them with artificially high prices indefinitely. The whole reason why monopolies arise is that the larger a firm gets the more advantages it tends to have (economies of scale). This process does have a limit. Beyond a certain point, bigness becomes a net disadvantage. The trouble is that when the optimal size of a business is reached, it may be so big as to be supplying most of the Australian market. There is simply no room for any local competition. In this case, we must have international competition. If our local monopolist begins to put his prices up, he must have the threat of an overseas supplier coming in with lower prices to deter him. Mr Whitlam's recent cut in tariffs has shown that they can be reduced without fear of creating unemployment.
<br><br>
<b>Restrictive trade practices</b>
<br><br>
Another thing that the U.S.A. has had for many years, but which Australia seems only now to be on the brink of getting is restrictive trade practices legislation. This is legislation to forbid small groups of suppliers getting together in various ways to form themselves into an effective monopoly. This can be done both by mergers and by prices agreements. Both have long been rife in Australia. Since our market is so small that it can in many industries support only a small group of suppliers (an 'oligopoly'), it is very easy for collusion to exist beneath what on the face of it does appear to be competition. The American legislation referring to such matters is generally referred to as 'anti-trust' legislation and even it could be strengthened. The businessmen do not like it, but it is good for the consumer.
<br><br>
<b>Price control</b>
<br><br>
Finally, for the cases where there is little prospect of prices being kept down by competition, bureaucratic price control must be resorted to. It is only second best, but it is probably better than no control at all. Such is the ever increasing specialisation of modern life that it seems we will always have at least some monopolies with us. There must, therefore, always be some means of checking on whether they are getting greedy or not. It must not, however, be assumed that a monopoly is utterly without check in the absence of bureaucratic price control. There is always inter-product competition and the threat or reality of public criticism. Perhaps the best example of the former is the experience of Australian Consolidated Industries ( ACI ) -- Australia's one-time glass monopoly. ACI had been dozing for many years in its comfortable monopoly position when suddenly beer in cans came along. Its monopoly was broken not by another glass firm setting up, but by competition from another monopoly -- Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP), our steel monopoly. Suddenly ACI had to become innovative and think of the consumer again. BHP itself is the best example of the second form of check that monopolies are subject to -- public criticism. So great has been the national paranoia about BHP that it has actually been afraid to put up prices until it was long overdue.
<br><br>
Here is an example where government price control is needed to help put prices up rather than keep them down. We will only in the long run import steel and pay higher prices for the imported product unless BHP is given more realistic prices now.
<br><br>
To sum up this chapter: It is advocated that inflation due to weak government be prevented by introducing a strengthened version of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board. This would have the obligation to set maximum limits to total government spending (given any particular tax base) as well as controlling banking ('monetary') policy. It is argued that strong unions cause inflation and that such inflation can be solved by a three-pronged policy of automatic national productivity and cost of living wage increments, together with the use of a non-monetary job relativities index. Individual solutions are also advanced for other less central causes of inflation.
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-17472128041165727622006-06-26T23:06:00.000+10:002008-02-26T23:10:20.334+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 17 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
This chapter originally appeared as a column in <i>Nation Review</i>, 13 April 1973, p. 785.
<br><br>
<b><font size="5"> How to Control Union Power </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John Ray
<br><br>
OUR CONTINUING WAVE Of petrol strikes, particularly in NSW, must be causing a lot of people to think that it is about time we had something like America's Taft-Hartley amendment in Australia. Under this law an American president can order striking workers back to work if their strike is endangering the national economy.
<br><br>
Transferring this legislation directly to Australia wouldn't work at all, of course. It is directly dependent on the immense prestige of the presidential office in the U.S.A.-to which we have no equivalent. An Australian PM ordering workers back to work would be greeted only with amused smiles.
<br><br>
We might consider a law that said some restriction of the right to strike must be accepted where workers are employed in a strategic industry-and simply fine such strikers whenever a strike occurs, regardless of the reason for the dissatisfaction. To do so however would only be to run up against the same basic problem -enforcement.
<br><br>
If strikers simply choose to ignore both the law and the instructions of their government, there is nothing at the moment that we can do about it. You can't put a whole union into jail. Even jailing their leaders, as we have found in Australia, just doesn't work.
<br><br>
Labor has no answer to the problem. I do however think that we in Australia are in a unique position to apply what would in fact be a workable solution. This stems from Australia's long commitment to the notion that disputes between unions and employers should be settled in the courts-just as are disputes between individuals.
<br><br>
We no longer allow the law of the jungle to rule in disputes between individuals. Why should we allow it to rule in disputes between groups of individuals? Surely no one would dispute that the rule of law is better than the rule of might.
<br><br>
Our Australian system falls down, however, precisely because we can never have enough police to lock up all those who flout industrial court decisions. We have the legal system-which is a start that other countries do not have -- but we don't have the power to back it up.
<br><br>
In this situation there is an historical precedent we can refer to. There was once before a time when the king's law could not always be enforced -- in the times of old England before police had ever been invented. An individual who defied the law in those days could often not be caught so he was declared an 'outlaw'. This meant that by defying the law he placed himself outside the law, i.e. he had to forgo his rights under law and the protection that the law affords even to the criminal.
<br><br>
In other words, anyone who so chose could use him for target practice without committing any crime or fearing any legal penalty. It meant he was on his own. For creatures of civilisation it was the ultimate penalty indeed. We still have that penalty available today.
<br><br>
The beauty of providing such a penalty for strikers who defied court orders to return to work is that it would never have to be used. One individual might risk such a penalty but a whole group of strikers would have to be totally out of their minds to do so. Even if a subset of strikers did decide to stay out, enough of the strikers would be determined not to risk it to make a continuation of the strike of little effect. This incentive to avoid outlawry would be provided by the fact that not only police and the army would have the right to beat up, torture, imprison and kill the outlaws but vigilante groups of enraged citizens could also do so.
<br><br>
At present strikers are having it both ways. They have the freedom to injure other peoples interests while other people have no right to hit back at them. Their freedom is our unfreedom. Their freedom to defy the court deprives us of the freedom to buy petrol.
<br><br>
They are destroying the basic symmetry of all legal philosophy -- that rights imply duties. They are accepting the protection afforded by law while acknowledging no obligation to the law. We may have to restore the symmetry by withdrawing the protection. As societies become more and more interdependent, strikes will become increasingly disruptive and intolerable. Societies will be forced to insist on the rule of law in industrial disputes.
<br><br>
It is sad and paradoxical that outlawry may be the only way to achieve it.
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-16607872527213196352006-05-26T23:08:00.000+10:002008-02-26T23:09:49.157+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 18 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br><br>
<b><font size="5"> Why Price Control Won't Work </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By: PETER SAMUEL
<br><br>
Price controls are not the simple solution to inflation most people seem to envisage. There is one kind of evidence of this in South Australia which has had price controls in operation more or less continuously for thirty years. Prices in that State have risen by almost the same amount as everywhere else in Australia. To be a bit more precise, going back the twenty-four years of the consumer price index, prices have risen by 282 per cent in Adelaide compared with 297 per cent in all six State capitals.
<br><br>
Price control merely raises the very difficult question of what cost increases, especially wage cost increases, should firms be allowed to cover with price rises? The Chifley Labor Government is said to have been voted out of office quite largely because of its persistence with price control. At least, these controls and associated rationing were thought by many contemporary commentators to have ranked with the attempted nationalisation of the banks and the disruptive coal and transport strikes as issues contributing to the defeat of the Chifley Government.
<br><br>
For about two decades afterwards price controls were associated in the minds of the majority of the public with a whole host of undesirables such as government bureaucracy, blackmarketeering, shortages, ration cards, and queueing. But the early seventies seems to be seeing a swinging back of the pendulum of opinion in favour of controls, with the pollsters reporting around two-thirds of the electorate now wanting direct price regulation. Memories of the postwar years have faded.
<br><br>
The scope for squeezing business profits is smaller than most people realise. Take the estimates for the coming financial year which the Treasury has published in the budget papers. Wages and salaries are expected to rise by seventeen per cent or $3,800 million during the course of the year, of which about $1,200m would be extra pay to government employees and $2,600m extra pay for private sector employees. Total pre-tax company incomes in Australia last year was $3,663 million, and non-farm unincorporated enterprises (shops and other small businesses) $2,513 million. The pre-tax profits of the entire non-farm private sector were $6,176 million. At their present rate of growth, wage and salary increases accompanied by a prices freeze would entirely eliminate private sector profits within thirty months.
<br><br>
Only a government of the Allende brand which wished to drive the private sector into bankruptcy would contemplate such a policy. A somewhat less radical government might want to compress total profits by say, twenty per cent. Even this would create grave problems for many businesses, since rates of return vary considerably and ability to absorb cost increases through improved productivity differs greatly from firm to firm. But even such a step as aiming to reduce total profits by twenty per cent would provide only six months breathing space at current rates of wage increases. So price control inevitably takes any government back to the question of how to control wages. In a modern economy with many highly capitalised industries where the cost of strikes are enormous, strong unions are able to extort large percentage increases in wage rates from management, and the weaker unions are able to invoke the principle of 'comparative wage justice' to ensure that these flow through to the rest of the workforce.
<br><br>
Would all this be changed by a government which introduced price controls? The answer is: probably not. Because the union movement is very heavily manned by people who either want to radically reduce business profits or even to exploit price controls to destroy them altogether. And the general wage pace is always set by the most militant unions, since all the others feel a need to avoid dropping behind. If price controls are not to be an exercise in business-bashing then they have to be accompanied by wage restraints.
<br><br>
Then there is the sheer problem of controlling prices. A simple freeze of all prices is easy enough but it cannot last much more than three months, or at the most six months without starting to produce serious unemployment, bankruptcies and supply shortages in low return, low productivity-growth industries.
<br><br>
The experience of short prices freezes has been that they are generally complied with even if they are left voluntary. In Britain, the U.S.A. and New Zealand firms have generally been prepared to accept short price freezes to avoid public antagonism. But wherever freezes have been ended without longer term measures of control they have been followed by price explosions, restoring the rate of inflation very quickly to previous rates.
<br><br>
Longer term price controls are surrounded by fundamental problems. Business people have a great variety of means of avoiding the controls one way or another if they do not like them. Product quality can be reduced, service cut or options reduced. And if price restraint is pressed to any lengths, output may drop and shortages replace price increases as the manifestation of inflation.
<br><br>
Soon after price controls were introduced into the U.S.A., the union leader George Meany got the newspaper headlines by pointing out than a can of his favourite Matzo ball soup contained only three Matzo balls after price control compared with four before. 'The case of the missing Matzo ball' quickly came to characterise the problem of producer resistance to controls.
<br><br>
And once resistance to price control takes the form of reduced output and shortages begin to appear, the consumer loses all bargaining strength, and gets in a very weak position. Buying becomes more time consuming, sellers can adopt contemptuous 'take it or leave it' attitudes and choice is reduced. Inflation is not being eliminated, it merely takes a new form.
<br><br>
In some large areas of spending price control is simply impossible. For example, jobs done on tender such as housebuilding and personal services from such people as doctors, hairdressers, motor mechanics and television repairmen. Governments can lay down elaborate lists of services with price tags attached but it will always be up to the service dispenser to specify what services he has performed. A pound of flour is a pound of flour but what is a short surgery consultation or a general mechanical checking of your car?
<br><br>
The pointlessness of general price control leads those who want business to bear the burden of anti-inflation measures to attack profits. Wartime controls and some of those imposed recently in Western countries have focused on profits because of the difficulty of controlling hundreds of thousands of prices of changing and often unmeasurable goods and services.
<br><br>
Limits on profits encourage businesses to increase their costs, either in reality or in accounting terms. In small businesses anyway costs and profits are very difficult to disentangle. The tax men already encourage small businessmen to become expert at padding the costs of their business and with price controllers also in the act, they will be even more active in the general use of the business car, the business telephone and purchasing items of household use through the business.
<br><br>
As for the companies, limits on profits are a heaven-sent excuse for management to exploit shareholders, through taking more in salaries and expenses. The incentive to greater efficiency whether by investment, by better management or use of new technology is largely destroyed by profit controls.
<br><br>
Heinz Arndt, economics professor at the Australian National University, said in a paper to the recent Perth ANZAAS congress: 'What is at stake, to put it bluntly, is the free market economy . . . the most promising and popular remedy is worse than the disease.'
<br><br>
The single positive aspect of attempts to institute price controls might be the educative effect of a competently run prices body in highlighting the real choices which the community faces --in publicising the hard fact that profits do not constitute a vast reservoir of wealth which wage earners can costlessly tap.
<br><br>
A major crunch will come in October when the Prices Tribunal reports on the BHP move for a 9.42 per cent price rise. The public hearings of this vitally important case are over, and the tribunal staff are beginning work on the report. It is already clear that they are torn between economic and political considerations. Unless the tribunal staff can find some major errors in BHP's accounting, it seems as though they will have to conclude that the steel company's proposed price rise is fully justified, so overwhelmingly strong is the case it presents on its figures. Australia's biggest company has realised that its future depends heavily on the outcome and has put enormous effort into the strategy and tactics of its appearance before the tribunal. It should win its case.
<br><br>
But the tribunal is acutely aware of the politics of its existence, and may feel the need to compromise economic rationality in its first big show case. Government ministers are expecting a compromise judgment that a four or five per cent increase in steel prices is justified, and probably this would go down best with a general public which sees negotiation and compromise as the best way of settling such disputes. The future of the tribunal will be politically easier if it takes the middle course and establishes itself as a kind of arbitration body rather than as a coldly logical economic agency.
<br><br>
But if the tribunal is to establish itself as a soft rather illogical conflict resolver then it will not be playing any educative role. The views of one member of the tribunal, Dr Allan Fels, are well known because he was speaking about prices justification as an academic before its establishment. In a paper to the Economics Society in February he said some things which Labor politicians find most unpalatable: 'To make a significant impact on inflation, any prices policy needs to be complemented by an incomes policy.' And on the role of the tribunal: 'It is not the task of the tribunal to lower the share of profits as a whole permanently: if anyone's, this is the task of the government using tax policy. The tribunal's task at the most is to lower excessive profits in particular cases.' But that was an economist member of the tribunal speaking and it remains to be seen what the others think its role is.
<br><br>
<br><br>
EDITOR'S COMMENT:
<br><br>
We now know, of course, that the tribunal chose the path of political expediency rather than that of economic rationality. ( J.J.R. )
<br><br><br><br>
<i>This chapter originally appeared as an article in "The Bulletin", 22 September 1973, p. 27.</i>
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-73881359503883145202006-04-25T23:12:00.000+10:002008-02-25T23:13:43.097+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 19 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br>
<b><font size="5"> Economic Nationalism and Foreign Investment </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
John Ray
<br><br>
THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONALISM that the Labor party is trying to foster is in principle something that conservatives heartily approve of. Two areas where they cannot be expected to approve of it, however, are where it implies a diminution of our family-type ties with Britain and where it clashes with our economic self-interest. Unfortunately, it is in their economic nationalism that the Labor party most clearly has the gut-reaction of the average Australian on its side: I refer to their opposition to foreign investment.
<br><br>
Foreign investment in fact seems to have almost no defenders in public life. The task of getting through to the average Australian the message that foreign investment is really a gift we are lucky to receive, is one of such great difficulty that wise politicians never attempt it.
<br><br>
That foreign investment is a gift to us can most easily be seen if we look at some overseas examples: Singapore. In the last fifteen years, Lee Kuan Yew has brought Singapore out of the underdeveloped world into the developed world. In fifteen years! Singapore is now one of the world's rich countries. We are used to accepting that Asian countries might in fact never catch up with the West. So how did Singapore do it? Foreign investment. In fact the economically sophisticated Singaporean leaders chased after foreign investment like no-one else before or since. They begged rich Americans to set up businesses and factories in Singapore and offered big incentives if they did. Foreign investors were even given reduced taxes to encourage them.
<br><br>
The reason is plain to see. In order to build factories and give the workers better machines to work with, someone has to save. They have to save large sums of money in order to buy what are called 'capital goods'. It is because he lacks the savings to buy capital goods, because he has only a wooden stick to plough with, that the average Asian peasant is so poor (poor by Western economic standards). Foreign investment, however, solves the problem overnight. Some American gives you his savings to work with. A gift! And it is a gift -- in spite of the fact that the American doesn't see it that way. He of course sees it as an investment earning interest. That investment, however, enables the Asian to earn by his labour not only enough to pay interest to the American, but also enough to buy far more for himself than he ever could before. Countries that receive foreign investment get most of the benefit of saving without actually having to do any saving first.
<br><br>
Foreign investment, then, is something that has benefits for both parties. The investor earns interest and the people receiving the investment increase their productivity per man. If that were not so, how could the two parties be persuaded to enter into such an arrangement?
<br><br>
In spite of the obvious differences between Australia and Asia, the same basic principles hold. Australians themselves do have a very high savings rate -- second only to Japan. This stems primarily from the high rate of saving among our migrant population. For all that, our savings are not adequate to take advantage of all the investment opportunities that we encounter. So we import other people's savings and give them a share of what those savings earn.
<br><br>
Unlike the Asian, we could perhaps afford not to have any foreign investment. If we did so, however, we would either have to increase our own savings rate or give up many of the productivity increases that we could have had. We would, in a word, be poorer.
<br><br>
Totalitarian countries have more choice. They can force their country to save more; simply by giving the workers minimum wages and having the government itself do the saving. That is how Soviet Russia progressed and how China may progress. That is doing it the hard way. Japan also did it the hard way. They progressed without much foreign investment because their workers voluntarily saved at an unprecedented rate.
<br><br>
If we want to do things the easy way, however, foreign investment is the way to do it. One way we could get by with less foreign investment would be to stop protecting so many of our industries. Because of Australia's high tariffs, precious savings are channelled off into industries where we are inefficient (relatively unproductive) -- such as making motor cars. Our own savings might go further if they were allowed to be more efficiently employed.
<br><br>
The disadvantage of foreign ownership is that we don't get all the benefit of new investment. It is, however, better to get some than none at all. Without foreign investment, our workers would still be working with older machines that give them only a fraction of the productivity that they have now. Higher productivity means higher wages so we benefit that way even though the foreign investor takes the profits as his benefit. We should not forget, however, that the foreign investor doesn't get all the profits. In relative terms, he doesn't have much left after our tax man is finished with him either. One possible unfair disadvantage that foreign investment brings is the 'marketing agreement'. This might happen if American Ford said to Australian Ford: 'You are making good cars that would sell well in Asia, but we forbid you to export them in case they compete with our American products.' If this happened, Australia would definitely be the loser.
<br><br>
Australia, however, currently seems to be the beneficiary rather than the loser from such arrangements. Foreign-owned firms account for a disproportionate part of our exports. They tend to export more than do Australian-owned firms. One reason for this could be that American multi-national corporations find that they encounter less resistance in Asia and elsewhere to a car produced in Australia than one produced in America. Australia is more popular internationally than is the U.S.A., so the product of the Australian subsidiary is more popular than is the product of the American parent firm.
<br><br>
It might be old-fashioned, but the simplest answer to anyone who advocates that we 'buy back the farm' is: 'Why?' We can only make ourselves poorer if we try.
<br><br> <br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2161495753971505731.post-84652771048989142222006-03-25T23:11:00.000+10:002008-02-25T23:12:15.006+10:00<br><br>
<i>Chapter 20 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974</I>
<br><br><br>
<b><font size="5"> Why Some Prices Should Rise </font></b>
<br><br><br><br>
By: MILTON FRIEDMAN
<br><br>
'WHEN THE PRICE of a thing goes up,' wrote the British economist Edwin Cannan, in 1915, 'a good many people ... abuse, not the buyers nor the persons who might produce it and do not do so, but the persons who are producing and selling it, and thereby keeping down its price ... It certainly would appear to be an extraordinary example of the proverbial ingratitude of man when he abuses the farmer who does grow wheat because other farmers do not ... But have we not all heard the preacher abuse his congregation because it is so small?'
<br><br>
This ancient article, from which I have taken my title, has been brought to mind by the oil crisis.
<br><br>
Time and again, I have castigated the U.S. oil companies for hypocrisy for loudly proclaiming their allegiauce to free enterprise yet simultaneously undermining free enterprise by seeking and getting special governmental privilege (percentage depletion, pro-rationing of oil, import quotas, etc.). Yet we shall only hurt ourselves if we let resentment at their past misdeeds interfere with our adopting the most effective way to meet the present problem.
<br><br>
<i>Voluntary Co-operation</i>
<br><br>
The current oil crisis has not been produced by the oil companies. It is a result of governmental mismanagement exacerbated by the Mideast war. The price of natural gas at the wellhead has been held down for years by government edict. Since 15 August 1971, the price of retail gasoline and of fuel oil has been held down the the successive phases. The result has been to encourage consumption and discourage both current production and the expansion of capacity. It took the Mideast mar to bring these evil effects of price-fixing to a boil.
<br><br>
If all Mideast oil is shut off, we shall have to do without some ten per cent of our present oil supplies. That is no tragedy. It means going back to the rate of consumption of 1970 or 1971 -- when no one thought we had a catastrophic shortage of fuel.
<br><br>
The most effective wav to cut consumption and encourage production is simply to let the prices of oil products rise to whatever level it takes to clear the market. The higher prices would give each of the 210 million residents of the U.S.A. a direct incentive to economise on oil, to find substitutes for oil, to increase the supply of oil.
<br><br>
How much will the price have to rise? No one can tell. But if consumption must be cut by ten per cent, it is hard to believe the price would have to rise by more than, say, double that percentage. A twenty percent rise in oil and gasoline prices would not be nice -- but consider the alternative.
<br><br>
<i>Chance, Favouritism, Bribery?</i>
<br><br>
The only alternative is exhortation backed by compulsion: artificially low prices accompanied by governmental rationing. This method induces each of us to oppose the general interest rather than to further it. Our separate incentive is to wangle as much as we can from the rationing authorities. And they can have only the crudest criteria to know how to distribute the limited supplies. They have no way to know whose 'need' is genuine and whose is artificial -- even if we put to one side, as experience warns us we cannot, special influence, corruption and bribery.
<br><br>
Two hundred and ten million persons each with a separate incentive to economise; or 210 million persons dragooned by men with guns to cut down their use of oil -- can there be any doubt which is the better system?
<br><br>
But, you will say, rationing by price hurts the poor relative to the rich. What of the poor man with his old jalopy as the only way to get to work? The answer is straightforward. If high oil prices impose special problems on some, let us provide funds to mitigate their problenn. Let us not impose compulsion and waste on ninety-five percent to avoid special measures for five per cent.
<br><br>
Note that what is called for is higher prices for oil products <i>relative</i> to other products -- <i>not general inflation</i>. Only some prices should rise.
<br><br>
The oil problem offers a particularly clear illustration of how the price system promotes both freedom and efficiency, how it enables millions of us to co-operate voluntarily with one another in our common interest. It brings out equally why the only alternative to the price system is compulsion and the use of force.
<br><br>
It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that governmental allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis. This will not prevent higher prices, which will in fact do the job -- but you may be sure that the rationing authorities will take the credit.
<br><br>
<br><br>
<i>This chapter originally appeared as an article in "Newsweek", 19 November 1973, p. 49.</i>
<br><br><br><br>jonjayrayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13363092874281160320noreply@blogger.com0